Will, you’ve got yourself a pretty good product there, good luck with your business getting it distributed!  You’ll be famous someday like the Red Bull guys… don’t forget the little people!

Check out the product for yourself at their site: Mojo Boost

And here’s the kicker.  He’s affordable, too.  Check out his website if you’re in the Fort Myers/Cape Coral/Naples metro areas to see what your rates would be – as they vary depending on your location and if you have kids, etc.  But I think you’ll be surprised.  I was able to lower my health insurance premium to an “emergency only” high deductible plan and the savings is greater than what I pay for his fee each quarter.  It may not be “right” for you, but it was for us and probably is for many of you as well.  I highly recommend you at least talk to him if you have any questions about his services.

Is this a sales pitch?  You bet it is.  I wouldn’t recommend a doctor unless I was 100% satisfied.  Do I get anything if you sign up as a patient?  Nope, I sure don’t.  But Andy will make a donation to a charity in my name if I refer someone.  Hey, I think that’s pretty cool too.  Any questions about my experience with him, please let me know!

Social Media is as big, if not bigger, than ever in terms of a great place to use for marketing your business.  You’ve got to make sure that you use them correctly, though or you’ll run the risk of being labeled a spammer on every social network that you’re on and you’ll quickly lose friends/followers/etc. quicker than you can snap your fingers.  You can market yourself indirectly, rather than just including links to your site and saying “HEY – Go here and buy my products/services!”.  Including social media in your email marketing campaigns is a great example of this.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.

Above all, don’t forget to “cross-pollinate” your marketing efforts.  If you are including sharing buttons in your email marketing campaign, don’t forget to remind your friends/followers on your social media sites that you have an email newsletter that they can sign up for.  This gets the promotion to them indirectly, as they feel that they are in control of having your advertisements show up in their Inbox, rather than showing up on their social media pages just because they’re you’re friend.  They can unsubscribe (theoretically – make sure this works!) from your e-mail marketing campaign if they feel that it’s not a good fit for what they are looking for, without de-friending you or unfollowing you.  It’s a much more user-friendly way of advertising to your audience.

Global time spent on social networking sites saw an 82% increase year over year in the month of December ‘09, amounting to five hours and thirty minutes per user per month, according to a just-released study by the Nielsen company. Facebook  led the way in time spent, and in traffic.  With this in mind, you simply cannot ignore the importance of utilizing social media for marketing your business.  Customers are more frequently turning to social media rather than simply using traditional search to find what they are looking for.  If you don’t capture the lead from social media, you can certainly bet that one of your competitors will.

Affiliate Summit East, the premier affiliate marketing conference, is taking place August 15-17, 2010 in New York City.

This three day conference includs an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors, and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts.

Looking forward to PubCon South in Dallas this year. It will be a nice change from PubCon in Vegas. Don’t get me wrong, I love Vegas – but there comes a time where you just need a change of scenery. The last 3 shows I’ve been to were in Vegas. I’ve never been to PubCon South but I’m looking forward to seeing what it has to offer. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed.

Thanks to the Milsap’s for putting on their annual tree burning party again. Once again, great food, lots of drinks, and a good time had by all. You could probably see the glow from the fire for miles, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a few planes on final approach to RSW got a good show too.

I highly recommend playing Doral if you ever get the chance. Being local, it’s not terribly difficult for me to get there during the off-season (off season = TERRIBLY HOT) and it’s reasonably priced during this time of year. Unfortunately, during the best golfing times of the year in South Florida, it’s fairly pricey to the tune of $300+ for the White course and even more to play the infamous Blue Monster. I do, however, recommend that anyone who likes playing golf to try to make this one of the places that you play at least once in your lifetime when you’re having fun doing everything else that Miami has to offer. It’s a challenging group of courses that you won’t regret trying.

T-Rex

T-Rex, located at Downtown Disney, is my favorite Disney restaurant so far. We’ve been quite a few times and have never been disappointed. The kids absolutely LOVE it. It’s a prehistoric themed restaurant where the dinosaurs actually move and there’s a simulation of a meteor hitting Earth where the entire restaurant turns red and rumbles. The atmosphere is A++ and the food and service have never been bad for us. We’ve been here 6 times now and our daughter asks us to go on every trip to Disney. Highly recommended!

SEO is pointless if your bounce rate is nearing 100% and the average time a visitor spends on your site is a matter of seconds. That’s the equivalent of having a storefront on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles where you get a lot of people opening your door, looking around for a few seconds inside, then turning around and leaving. All you’ve ended up doing is invested a lot of time and money into your store and pay a lot of rent to keep it open but no one comes inside to buy anything. There are some very simple concepts that you absolutely MUST follow in order to convert visitors to your site into bookmarkers, clients, customers, or whatever the goal of your site is.

Research shows you have about 2 seconds from the time a visitor hits your landing page before they decide whether to stay on your site and look around or if they want to click the back button and go to a different site. Here’s some basic tips on what you can do to win the hearts and minds of your visitors during that brief time period:

• Invest in a good site design. No one wants to visit a site in today’s Web 2.0 world that looks like it was taken right off of a generic free template site or designed by a firm that hasn’t escaped from the year 2000. Design concepts change very quickly in today’s web world. Keep up with it, or your competitors will leave you in their dust.
• Update your site frequently with new content. No one wants to see a stale site (including the search engines). If you post news to your site and the last post was 2 months ago, visitors will think the site is abandoned and they’ll leave. If you have an e-commerce store, let your customers know what’s on sale, upcoming sales, new product promotions, etc. If you’ve got a corporate site, let your visitors know what’s happening with your company right now. No news in this case, is probably bad news. If you don’t have anything interesting to say or can’t quite figure out what to post on your site frequently, don’t include dates on your previous additions. You absolutely do NOT want your latest addition/post/etc. to your site to be a date far in the past.
• Use proper grammar and punctuation. Spell check is a beautiful tool. USE IT FREQUENTLY! Misspelled words, incomplete sentences, and other common grammatical problems make a site appear unprofessional and, for lack of a better term, “cheap”. You know what you want to say, but please take the take to double check your work and run your text through a grammar checker. This is probably my number 1 pet peeve when I visit a site. If you can’t take the time to double check your work, you will appear lazy to your customer. And how is a lazy company going to treat its’ clients?
• Provide value to your visitor. This should go without saying, but I think it’s important to mention it anyway. You MUST provide value to your visitor. Do your research before you ever start your site. If you sell products and your cost for the product is $3.00 higher than what a competitor sells that same product for, what value are you bringing to the web community by starting up a store to sell that product? Sure, you may get a few sales from people that don’t do their research – but you should focus on bringing value to the net as a whole. If you offer value, you’ll capture your visitors’ attention right off the bat.
• Clearly outline the benefit your visitor will get from your site. If you run an e-commerce store, let them know why they’re better off doing business with you than your competitors. If you publish news, why is your visitor going to be better off bookmarking your site than your competitor’s site?
• Be honest in your claims. Again, this is something very basic that everyone should already understand but I felt it was necessary to include in this list. If your advertisement promises your visitors a “Black Friday FREE SHIPPING Special!” (I use this analogy because I’m writing this post on Black Friday), make sure that once that visitor makes it to your site that you are re-enforcing your claim that if they shop with you today on Black Friday that they will indeed receive free shipping. If there’s some sort of coupon code that they need to use to get free shipping, make that code readily available. If that’s the catch that brought them to your site to begin with, don’t make it difficult for them to purchase and receive free shipping.
• Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. In reality, you should be using specific landing pages based on what the visitor searched for to make sure that they end up on a good page where they are seeing EXACTLY what they searched for, but if that’s impossible then it is imperative that you have clean, easy to use navigation on your site so that they can find their way around your site. Search boxes are good, drop down category lists of products are good, easy to search lists of manufacturers are good. Use your imagination and think to yourself, “If I were a visitor on this site, how would I try to find what I am looking for and where would I look on the page?”.
• Don’t overdo marketing/sales hype. You’ve already gotten them to your site with your marketing and sales techniques, so you don’t need to overdo that once they’re on your site. You don’t want to come across as pushy, and you definitely don’t want to come across as “cheesy”. Be clear and concise on what it is that you are offering in a meaningful, educated fashion.
• Be security conscious. Identity theft is rampant these days, which is unfortunate because there are so many ways to prevent it. You’ve invested in the 128-bit encrypted SSL key for your store, so why not advertise that? Make your visitors feel safe at your site. Do you offer something that requires them to give you their email address? Ensure them that you don’t sell your email lists to other companies (and don’t lie to them if you do!). People are very hesitant to give out their information online, so you need to concentrate on ways to ease their fears and convince them that your company is safe.
• Keep trying to find ways to make your site better. There are numerous free and inexpensive ways available to track analytics on your site. Track your checkout funnel, see where you’re losing visitors, and find ways to better those pages to keep your visitors on your site. There’s no such thing as the perfect site, but as an active, responsible business owner it’s in your best interest to continually find ways to improve your site. Not to mention that as your improve your site, you’re making it better for the web community as a whole.