Making Sanity Out of An Insane World

On the converse/flip side, I had 3 really great high powered meetings and appointments that could ultimately prove very financially lucrative to my company’s in the future.

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Believe in Yourself

Yes, we are still steeped in a recession and it is mid 2010. Yes, I still see all the reports that real estate is low and people still cannot find decent jobs and contracts. I experience the same stuff that everyone else does, trust and know this. I came back to Atlanta to be with my daughter and most importantly ink a couple of lucrative contracts with major corporations in Atlanta. Guess what? All three of them fell through when they looked so promising when I was sitting in my living room in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I could sit here and tell you how tough it is, how rough that was for me financially, and how pissed off I am. As a leader and child of God, I cannot do this. I must look at the bright side in an insane world. In fact, what if the world is not insane at all and this recession is all a normal and regular part of the earth’s movement? On the converse/flip side, I had 3 really great high powered meetings and appointments that could ultimately prove very financially lucrative to my company’s in the future. I’m glad I met everyone and glad I was able to pitch to them. I’m thankful for the opportunity to do so. Was it disappointing? No doubt. Was it rejuvenating? No doubt. Was it meaningful and a symbol on the path to my personal prosperity? No doubt.

In order to make sense of this world that has become rather tough to operate in, we must look at the bright side and the flip side of the coin. It is getting better everyday in every way. We are alive right now in order for us to do something great with our lives. Keep it moving. Have a prosperous week and year!

Math Is The Key To Business Success

You have to become a numbers person in order to become successful in business. Traditional people will disagree because many classically trained MBA types are trained to think that becoming the best at something makes you do well.

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Doing the math in business is critical to ones success. Business is about mathematics. You have to become a numbers person in order to become successful in business. Traditional people will disagree because many classically trained MBA types are trained to think that becoming the best at something makes you do well. This is partially true. I have personally seen the best software engineers in the Silicon Valley make $100,000 per year while people that dropped out of school made $300 million.

To illustrate this point, I know one of the best software architects in the Bay Area. They are world renowned and respected throughout the finest organizations in the Bay Area. This individual makes over $125,000 per year. In contrast, I know a young software developer who dropped out of The University of California Berkeley and developed his own software and turned around and sold it to some investors for $25 million. He did not want to be the best software developer. Instead, he wanted to build a company and sell it for millions. This was his plan from the start.

He had a two page business plan that identified the goal, the strategy, and how he would do it on his own from his shared apartment in Oakland, California. It worked and now he’s living in Boca Raton, FL in a waterfront mansion that cost him $2.5 million. In the music industry, people always say that they want to sell 1 million records and go platinum. The only reason that they must sell 1 million records is because they only receive roughly $.10 per dollar in sales of the record. If they sell $1 Million worth of records, they will only see $100,000 in income.

Conversely, if they own their publishing and get a decent distribution deal, they will earn $.80 per dollar of album sales. In the above scenario, they would take home $800,000 instead of $100,000 in total income. Knowing numbers intimately will determine how high you go. Make sure you have a lawyer or an accountant review all numbers before you ink a deal with anybody.

Be careful out there in the market especially when you get successful. Make sure you handle your business and focus on the numbers first and foremost. The numbers do not lie. Make sure that your business documents or articles of incorporation outline you as the majority shareholder of your business. When it starts to get successful, present your potential investors and partners with your articles showing them that you have ownership of your work or your writing.

How To Build Your Most Important Brand: YOU

Building your brand on the Internet should be your number one goal. I do not mean Twitter. Analyzing Twitter for traffic this week alone for my site shows and proves that Twitter generates only one link per day of traffic to my website.

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Gerard Spinks Internet Branding

Building your brand on the Internet should be your number one goal. I do not mean Twitter. Analyzing Twitter for traffic this week alone for my site shows and proves that Twitter generates only one link per day of traffic to my website. So, all in all, tweeting is really just like the Verizon Wireless commercial when the dad is tweeting outside and his son is tired of him tweeting nonsense. Twitter will not help build web traffic.

I don’t care what your brand is, who you work for, or what you do, you should forever be selling your personal brand. Social media sites have proven this as well. I have put my resume on LinkedIn and it sat there for a year doing absolutely nothing until I started writing and becoming a thought leader on LinkedIn.

So, how to grow the personal brand on the Internet? How do you get seen and heard and increase web traffic and most importantly, how do you measure that traffic and consider it a success? Especially for the urban minority community and black enterprise?

I consult with many different types of people in my day to day business management consulting operation. When I say different types I mean it. From software developers, to public relations company owners, to songwriters, to scriptwriters, to book writers, to real estate agents, to actors. And, the resounding theme that I’m noticing is in personal brand development and the lack thereof.

You MUST look at yourself as a brand more than ever RIGHT NOW. Whether you have a resume on LinkedIn or a small business website from Yahoo Small Business, or a Google website. You need to do what a brand marketer does. Get yourself out there on the Internet and measure your success every single week. You must become an authority and a writer and begin to write about what you do and present that to people every day.

Mainstream America is already up on this and has mastered Internet brand management for years. Now, the urban community and the community at large MUST understand this concept immediately or perish. If you’re an Atlanta spa owner for example, you should set up an account at Ezine and start writing daily about the different products that you offer at your spa as well as talk about the different services that you offer. Without fail, this should be written about daily or every other day as an article that is published on the Internet in what is known as article marketing.

After you create your articles, review your statistics and watch what people are reading and how they are clicking on your website. Make sure you have a blog site from WordPress or a true website all your own that you can run Google analytics on each day. In one week’s time, my articles have been viewed 4,540 times this week alone from September 6, 2009 – September 10, 2009 and the week is not over yet. This builds credibility and your authority on business matters. It eclipses what you can do on Twitter.

Article is republished from my original article written on the Atlanta Examiner website.

The Basics of Building Internet Traffic

Today, thus far, my blog has been read by approximately 650 people. If I paid for this traffic using Pay Per Click Advertising at roughly $1.00 per click for the keywords that I target or more, I would have spent $650-$1300 today on advertising campaigns to get those visitors. Your Internet traffic lies in your [...]

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Today, thus far, my blog has been read by approximately 650 people. If I paid for this traffic using Pay Per Click Advertising at roughly $1.00 per click for the keywords that I target or more, I would have spent $650-$1300 today on advertising campaigns to get those visitors.

Your Internet traffic lies in your click through rate. You will pay for it using advertisements or by generating it yourself organically. The choice is yours. New media is about hustling for those clicks. Pay per click ads are effective too but are costly.

You must reach your target market without spending $600 per day on ad buys or $4,200 per week. We help you reach this traffic for much cheaper rates than that. It still costs money and please don’t get it twisted that web marketing is free.

You will never reach your designated target market with some sort of ad spend. It comes down to reducing that spend, reaching the market, and keeping money in your pockets as much as possible while leveraging your reach.

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The Black CEO Guide To Driving Traffic To Your Website

There is all kinds of information on the web talking about people making money online, retiring with a bunch of hot chicks around them at the age of 26, and living somewhere on Fisher Island in Miami on Biscayne Bay. People make it seem like you simply throw up a blog, throw up some Adsense [...]

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There is all kinds of information on the web talking about people making money online, retiring with a bunch of hot chicks around them at the age of 26, and living somewhere on Fisher Island in Miami on Biscayne Bay.

People make it seem like you simply throw up a blog, throw up some Adsense Ads, and watch the revenue pour in. This is the furthest thing from the truth. Building a successful website of any magnitude starts with mastering building traffic.

You can spend $30,000 on building an elaborate online storefront and if 5 people per day come to visit your store, you will go out of business quicker than you set up the store. This is why I am such a proponent of phasing in building traffic and then knowing what will stop you from getting good traffic.

1). You will NOT get traffic if your web server is forwarded via a DNS to another server. For example, if you registered and started your website 6 years ago on some hosting platform and do a DNS forward on that website to another site, your traffic will be dismal.

2). Don’t ever host your site on a larger community site such as WordPress or Blogspot. These sites take all of your traffic and count it as their own. You will never get true statistics and know your true traffic numbers by using these.

3). Never use Yahoo Small Business and utilize their Sitebuilder tools to build your website. The Yahoo Small Business Server is horrible for SEO and your numbers will suffer significantly.

4). Update with new content regularly. You cannot put up a website and only update it once per week or month and hope for it to get huge numbers.

5). You must get reputable sites to linkback to your site to improve your ranking and your traffic.

6). You must create a goal for your site and measure it. In other words, what do you want the web visitor to do? Should they subscribe to your RSS feed? Should they buy a product? Should they register for email? Set up a goal and monitor/measure against that goal.

7). Understand Alexa Page Rank and what it means to your business. You must become a beast on improving your page rank. You should never, ever compromise this and always work each and everyday to get your page rank up into the top 100,000 sites in your country.

8). Have patience. You will need time to improve your website traffic as you grow. You will not make money until traffic starts to come to your site. Don’t give up on growing it.

9). Write a blog as much as you can. Bring your visitors in closer to you as the CEO. Let them know more about you and make sure they know you are an expert in your field. Talk about what you do and how you do it without giving up trade or industry secrets.

10). Measure your progress weekly. Always measure your site and your statistics. I do it daily. Make sure you know what people are interested in on your site. See what’s popular and refine that.

Good luck.

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What Black Owned Business Enterprises Need To Do For Success

Black owned businesses are unique in America. We are in a strange position of having a soaring unemployment rate and are the last to get hired. It is also very tough to also get funding for black businesses. As usual, it will require a ton of heavy lifting to get our businesses successful. The reality [...]

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Black owned businesses are unique in America. We are in a strange position of having a soaring unemployment rate and are the last to get hired. It is also very tough to also get funding for black businesses. As usual, it will require a ton of heavy lifting to get our businesses successful. The reality is that no one is beating down our doors for jobs, income, or funding so we must figure out a way to do this ourselves.

Even though people can’t embrace this fully, the Internet and the mobile phone is the future. We must pro-actively understand the complexities of the Internet and not shrug it off and not consider understanding web services and Internet technologies. The new dinosaur, who was killed off and didn’t survive during the ice age, are those who do not understand the Internet from a technological point of view.

The people who will win in the coming 10 years, are people who know the Internet and who leverage the Internet to grow their businesses. Do it now. It’s your only chance for survival.

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All posts are original content by Gerard Spinks Publishing, LLC, Atlanta, GA USA 678-993-7743