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Text to Speech Podcasting widget for bloggers

Hi, fellow small business owners. 

This is the first blog post after installing a text to speech function to the site. This is a great idea for all bloggers to look at, as it not only provides a great function to you blog site but also a very user-friendly addition for the visually impaired.

If you have a blog for your small business you can now add this function as demonstrated on this site and the beauty is, it is absolutely free.

The product used here is Odiogo and seems to work well, and the voice is a pleasant one which doesn’t grate on the ear.

Odiogo works on Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and other leading blog platforms.

The one thing you will have to take great care with is your punctuation. If you write your blog post and forget to use full stops, or comers, then the automated voice simply carries through the sentence without a break, making the sentence sound rushed and not a pleasant experience.

But there is more value in this product than first meets the eye. People reading your blog can download the article as an M.P.3. or automatically send to their iTunes or iPhone.

So now subscribers to your blog can listen to your article as a podcast as well. 

Once you have installed Odiogo on your blog, you will notice some functions below the play button, they are, a button to send your audio blog to iTunes, one to send the file to an M.P.3 player, and a button which says, More.

Clicking on the, More button will take you to another page which enables you to share your broadcast, or podcast in many ways, and to a number of social media sites.

The first section allows your clients to subscribe to your podcast via iTunes, Juice and Zune, as well as being able to share your podcast on such sites as Facebook, digg, and yahoo.

On top of that you or your blog audience can download your podcast as an M.P.3, this can also be used on your website as a way of getting people to subscribe to your blog. 

All in all, I can see many great uses for this little product, one which could help drive traffic to your site, or at the very least get your message to people who just do not have the time to read articles, but are quite happy to listen to them in the background while they get on with their work.

Thanks for reading, and now hopefully listening to this blog, we will bring you more innovations to help your S.E.O. and Internet marketing soon. In the meantime if you would like to chat about how we can help, then call me on 07867 546 101.

This article was written by Andy Phillips from Business For Life

Investment Clubs and a Property Revolution

It's been an incredibly busy time for us here at Business For Life. Momentum has been gathering for The Ultimate Investor Club which we have helped Successful Trader Andrew Mason put together.

Ultimate Investor Club

The Ultimate Investor Club is an exciting challenge for us, as we have been looking to get involved in a genuine club for traders for a long time. It wasn't till Andrew spoke to us about how Business For Life could help him, we decided to join him.

The Ultimate Investor Club is not a business, it's just a club.

Having said that, it's been just as much work trying to get it together, same sort of organisation and passion has gone into it and now the web site is up (done by yours truly) it is really beginning to take shape.

If any of you are interested in joining us, we have an open evening on the 7th and another one on the 21st of May. Because this is not a business we do not charge the earth to get involved. The Ultimate Investor Open Evening is just £10.00 to get in if pre-booked and the membership for the full year is £295.00

This is really just to cover the cost of the rooms etc.

The first meeting on the 7th will be a bit nerve racking, but I am so passonate about the club and being able to make this work that it will be very exciting as well.

Safeguarding the Equity In your Property

Another part of the business is our JV with a Financial Expert who has joined us to bring something called a Cenoption to market.

This is a brand new product which safeguards the equity in your home and investment property. I believe, once this concept takes off, it will revolutionise the way we buy property in the future. For Property Investors it is a professional way to hedge against market fluctuations. 

In essence, you purchase a Cenoption on the value of your property at purchase irrespective of what you purchased it for. Then in 3-10 years you can exercise your option by selling the property to the Option Provider for the agreed value.

Say you purchased a property for £70,000 which has been valued (RICS) at £100,000. You could purchase a Cenoption on the full value at this time of £100,000 even though you purchased the property for only £70,000.

Then in 3-10 years you want to exit from the investment, you simply sell the property to the Option Provider for £100,000 and walk away from the deal with profit in your pocket. You have effectively planned your exit route from the day you purchased the property. All this and no selling fees such as Estate Agents, Advertising etc and minimal voids.

Planning the exit route form day one, to me, is an amazingly professional way of doing business.

Ok thats all for now

Andy Phillips

SEO Connections

Firstly - Be prepared I will be asking you to contribute to this blog, so read to the end....

I have just come back from a very interesting meeting with some Internet Marketing friends of mine, we were discussing different approaches to get traffic to both our sites and the sites of our customers.

There were some interesting conversations flying around the table, some were tried and tested on page SEO like making sure you have a good description of what the page is about in the title of your page as opposed to your company name etc.

It also came up in conversation that most people who have a website or have had one designed for them, do not have some of the most basic optimisation within their site, we still see page titles such as "Home" or "Welcome". The title of every page in your site is some of the most precious SEO Real Estate you can have and to waste it on "home" which the search engines are going to have no Idea what that page is relating to is poor.

Anyway, I decided the very next article I post to my blog will be a 10 point strategy to put all the basic SEO elements into you site.  So look out for that!!!

But I did have another Idea

I get a lot of emails from people who subscribe to the newsletter, asking questions on SEO and other Internet Marketing matters. I also get some ideas from you every so often, some of those ideas are great, so I thought I would set you a little challenge, that would also help a lot of other people as well.

What you need to do:

If you have an idea, it does not matter if it's a tried and trusted rule of SEO. Don't forget there are people who read this blog who are just starting up and would love to see a comment from you even if' it's been covered before. Post it to this blog!!

In fact I encourage you to put down either an Idea to boost traffic to your site or a favorite which should not be forgotten.

Let's share these ideas out amongst us all, I will add comments as I go. so get posting.

Any ideas will be appreciated by the whole community.

I look forward to seeing them posted here or to my email. Don't forget to Sign your post and include your own web site address

Important:: Put your website address in the body of the text

All the best

Andy Phillips

6 Steps to SEO your site

Here are some basic rules to optimise your site. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation sounds like a bit of a dark art, but think of it as a logical step to help search engine spiders find the site, after all they are only pieces of code which have a program looking for certain things.

Lets be clear about what the spiders job is, in fact lets look at what the search engines job is. The search engines are there to provide you with the most relevant pages for your search term/s. That's is, nothing more. The spiders job is to find all the pages it can, find out what the page is about, and then index it in a database and put some sort of score on how relevant it is to a search term. All we are doing with SEO is making sure we have a better than average chance of being indexed correctly and showing that we are the most relevant site for specific key search terms.

So how do we do that?

1. Keywords - Understanding the keywords and phrases which you need to use so the spiders know what your site is about is an essential part of the SEO process. Remember the spiders do not think, they just collate and index. You can use software to get your keywords (Wordtracker, Good Keywords)or you sit down with a piece of paper and brainstorm them. The psychology behind keywords is pretty simple, and goes back to basic marketing principles. 

a. Who is your customer?

b. when they go on the internet to search for your product, service or activity what do they type in?

c. write down all the words and phrases you think they use.

You now have a keyword and Key Phrase list.

Ill give you and example of a site I recently built for a Property Networking Club in Leeds. Straight off you can see keywords jumping out at you. PROPERTY, NETWORKING, LEEDS

If I was in Leeds and I wanted to find a Networking meeting in my area about property, I would probably put into my yahoo or google search, "property networking in leeds" or something similar. 

Keywords could also be names of people involved, or guest speakers etc. So once this list is put together. you can carry out the rest of the 10 steps. It is worth doing some further research into keywords and their usage.

2. Page Name (Page Title) - One of the most important placements for keywords is in the page title, if you think about it, it's probably the first place a spider will look to see what the page is about in order to index. Tell the spiders what this site, or page is about in the shortest most relevant way.

Do not put your company name in the page title unless you are a huge company and people will be searching specifically for you. This is one of the biggest mistakes small companies make. It is a total waste of SEO real estate. If you sell German Shepherd dog puppies then put in your index page title "German Shepherd dog puppies" because that's what people will be searching for.

Also, on every page of your site state in the title what that specific page is about. Do not use the same title on every page.

3.(h1) and (h2) tags

The headline or (h1 and (h2) tags are also a very important tool in your SEO toolbox.

(h1) Is your primary headline on each page of your site, there are many theories around their usage and some tricks which some SEO guys use to enhance the optimisation of their sites. Some of these techniques they use can be seen as spamming, and google etc will not tolerate some of these techniques.

So, for most sites, just use them with a chosen keyword or phrase, as long as it genuinely relates to the page content. Search engines expect your (h1) tag to contain some prime keywords.

As we move down the page you will be using sub headings. For this you would use the (h2) tag. This again is a great place to place keyword and key phrases which relate to the paragraph.

As you can see, all we are doing here is realising that with a bit of thought on our headlines and paragraph headers, we are assisting the spiders who crawl the page to be able to index us more accurately and therefore decide that the relevance of the .html file should be categorised where we want it to be. Every little bit helps!

4. Keyword density

Another subject which gets the SEO community into a huddle in the corner of darkened rooms to ponder and cogitate.

Using keywords and phrases within the content (the text) of the page is important, but you do not want to "keyword stuff" the page. The spiders will consider this spamming and it could count against you.

The idea of understanding SEO is to be able to write your headlines, sub headlines and content text with the concepts of SEO in your mind. In other words, write the text as you would normally write it, but have your list of keywords and phrases in front of you and use them when appropriate. Don't try to be too clever and NEVER write for SEO purposes. Just have SEO in mind when you write the content. 

5. Separate your products and services

Have a separate page for every different thing you do. If you do Blue coats and Red jackets then have a page for each. and have a keyword list for each. Using those keywords as detailed above.

Title of the page may be "Blue ladies coats for wet weather"

The (h1) tag for the main headline could be "Waterproof coats for ladies in Blue"

You get the picture

Having separate pages is not only good the the client, as you can send the link to existing customers in an email promotion as opposed to sending them to the front page of your site. It is also giving the search engine some keywords and a page to index. 

Now if someone was to search for " Ladies waterproof coats blue" your chances of being found is far greater because you have targeted the clients needs and optimised a page on your site which is highly relevant.

6. Inbound Links

The more links you have from other site, especially high ranking sites the more you will be crawled and the more relevant your page will be to the spiders.

You have to work to get links from other site, call them discuss what you can do for them, ask for a reciprocal link etc..

Once you have agreement from the other site for reciprocal links. Give them the .html code which you have written if you can. Using the SEO Guidelines above construct the link with a clickable title and a short explanation.

I hope this gives you some useful tips that you ga use straight away. Have a look on your site now and see if there are things you can change NOW!

Andy Phillips

For more information subscribe to our newsletter 

Some cool tools and tricks

Well, it's been a while since my last post, but in defense, I have been a little in the busy side. Since I set up the UK Small Business Websites page, I have had a ton of people wanting my time. Not that I'm complaining, far from it. In this economic climate I'm more than happy to be busy. 

Most of the people around me are extremely entrepreneurial and take the view that in times of limited customers or more importantly limited cash, it is now that they have to stick their heads above the crowd, in other words, up their marketing.

Now that does not necessarily mean spending more money on marketing, it simply means, using the same money in a more structured way. Simply put, instead of the lazy ways of just sticking an advert in the local or national paper, they are looking to use the internet more fully than they have in the past.

I have done so many landing pages for people this month, that the tips of my fingers are actually beginning to get hard. 

Anyway, on to the post.

This time I just wanted to share a few things I found which may help with some of the social media sites like twitter, facebook, Squidoo etc and the integration which has built up between them. This means that when you update one, it shares that update with other platforms. A case in point, I just finished writing a new lens on Squidoo and this gives me the choice to connect with twitter, which I did. The weird thing is that I have also set up twitter to update the status on my facebook account.

So from writing a lens on Squidoo, I have actually added 2 additional elements of content on to the internet. Now if you have heard me speak before or follow any of my writing, you will know my opinion on Internet PR, "the more you do the more you get noticed" especially by the search engine bots. So all in all I think it's all pretty cool.

By the way, if you would like to join me all the above are clickable to my Squidoo, twitter and facebook acounts, so come along and join me there,,,

The other thing I wanted to share with you was an as yet little known web address compressor. This comes in handy when you don't have much space to get a message across and you really don't want a long web address taking up valuable message space. Most people use tiny url, which is great, but sometime when space is tight, even that's too long. So take a look at http://is.gd/ and just as an example, here is one I did earlier....

I have a page on my website which has long url which is : http://www.businessforlife.co.uk/pulse-online-january-2009.html

As you can see this is a very long address for something like twitter which only gives you 140 characters to relay your message. Using is.gd you can compress the above url, which is 63 characters long to on like this http://is.gd/jrUG which is only 17 characters long. Good little tool.

Anyway, I will be posting again soon, so until then, happy marketing

Andy

Business Networking

Went to in interesting Business Network meeting this morning with 4NETWORKING where I met up with other local business people. It was a really good social atmosphere, not pretentious, not regimented, just business people looking to hook up with others in the area.

The one thing that came through from the discussions at the meeting was the problems small businesses have with marketing their products and services especially through the internet. 

all the companies there have or are putting up a web site. Their biggest issue is that nobody knows that they exist. This is mainly because within you chosen field of business there are thousands upon thousands of companies out there all doing a similar product or service as you.

So with this in your mind, how on earth are you going to get to the top of the listings on Google? the simple answer is that without spending considerable money, you're not. 

So what's the options?

Firstly you need to do some analysis on:

1. What your really offering?

2. Who are you offering your service or product to?

3. What is the profit on each sale you make

4. How much of that profit are you willing to spend on marketing?

5. How much cash are you prepared to spend right now to test the options available to you?

6. How much time are you prepared to give to increasing your presence on the internet?

Firstly write all the above down and then write out you answers, most people never do this so prove me wrong and do this exercise.

From this you will get a clearer picture of you position, it will also focus your thoughts. 

So the options:

Increase your internet presence and exposure through cash (Pay your way to the top) or through time. (Less cost, more time in front of the computer)

The Money Route:

Pay an SEO Company to optimise your web site, but be careful here, not all SEO Companies are the same, there are some very good companies that will not let you waste money on unnecessary optimisation and some who will shaft you for every penny they can. Best way to find the good companies is to ask other web site owners who they use or recommend.

Look at Pay-Per-Click campaigns through Google. This works great for some companies, most campaigns fall well short of expectation. If you do this route, do it small to start. Set a budget and stick to it, and most importantly monitor the results. You will soon realise that it is either working or not. By working I don't just mean that you're getting a few sales from it. Do a Profit and Loss analysis to see what the ratio of cost to sale is. 

I bet most of your business comes through recommendation, mine does.

The Time Route

This option cost little or nothing, and for a small company is a great way to start.

Forums

What ever your industry, there are Forums where you can post reply's to questions asked.

The point of this is:

1. Most of the time it's a potential client asking the question.

2. You set yourself up as an expert

3. You should always have a signature at the bottom of any post to a forum with:

a: Your name

b: Your phone number

c: your email address

d: Your web address

4. Within the answer you can put a URL (web address) to your website, or a specific page on your site which could answer the posters problem more fully. If you don't have a page that helps explain the issue then write one first and get it up on your site before answering the forum post.

5. tell them to call you, if they would like to any help with the issue.

6. Explain that you have a service which will help them with their problem, and tell them who to talk to with a phone number.

There are many more FREE ways to promote your business but I will leave them for my next blog entry.

Oh, that brings me to my next tip... Always leave them wanting more.

If you would like to discuss your option and some good advice please fell free to call me on 07867 546 101 we also have a service which can offer an initial consultation to focus on what you need to achieve and how to achieve it in the quickest possible time and then show you how to technically implement those ideas.

Or join our facebook group where we share lots of info like this 

Andy Phillips

andy@businessforlife.co.uk

www.businessforlife.co.uk

Mobile 07867 546 101

It's time to take a good hard look at Property Investing
Succeed where others FAIL!

Over the last couple of months I have heard nothing but doom and gloom about the state of property investing, and I'm wondering why?
It's time for everyone to take stock of the situation and get back on track. Now is a great time to purchase property, but you must have the right attitude, the right mindset.

So lets put some things together to ensure YOUR success.

1.    People always put the purchase of BMV property together with No Money Down. We are working to Simon Zutshi's model which is about Leaving No Money in as opposed to No Money Down.

2.    Buying with deep discount. If you look at what is happening in the market at the moment with prices on the slide. We know it is an economic FACT that property prices will bottom out and rise again. This means simply, that you can achieve discounts in excess of 20% on a regular basis. If you wait until the market shows signs of bottoming out and beginning to rise. These discounts will not be available, or at least not as easy to get.

3.    Use the products that are available today, don't bemoan the loss of Mortgage Express and say it can't be done. Look at what is available and make it work. Using the No Money Left In route you will be able to do these deals, you just need the right mindset.

Here's a plan of action

Book yourself on to Simon'sProperty Magic Live! Event on the4th and 5th of October and get a new lease of life into your property investment business.

This is a full 2-day event, which will change the way you invest. There is a golden opportunity for any Investor who takes advantage of the market as it is today.

The cost is only £497 + VAT and as always Simon provides MASSIVE VALUE to all his students.

For lots more info and to book your place CLICK HERE

It's not surprising that places are going quickly on this event. Simon Zutshi is one of the countries most respected Property Investment speakers and a Property Guru who has offers a no nonsense, real world approach to property investment with leading edge ideas and solutions. We were lucky enough to have Simon speak at one of our events in August "The Truth about BMV and No Money Down" and went down a storm.

My gut reaction says this isn't going to hang around for long...

Why? 

1) He's managed to convince Dolf de Roos to come along, who's pretty much THE world's biggest property expert, and he very rarely comes to speak in the UK (pretty much a couple of times a decade). So there's a 'celebrity factor' which will mean tickets are going to sell like hot cakes.

2) His Death of Property Investing report has generated huge word of mouth for the event. When Simon reveals how to acquire bargain, credit-crunch affected properties without even needing a mortgage (nor cash), it's hard not to talk about it.

3) He's offering 'fast action bonuses' for people who are decisive and sign up fast. But the longer you wait the less bonuses you'll win.

If nothing else, go and read this page to get an insight into the mindset of a professional investor during the Credit Crunch:

To book your place CLICK HERE NOW!