Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

Save the Date...December 17 at 6 p.m. ET

Last month Patsi and I had the pleasure of hanging out with Kathleen Gage of Street Smarts Marketing. Over a leisurely dinner, we discussed the state of Internet marketing and about all the people and clients we meet who have great ideas and incredible expertise and who can never seem to get an Internet-based business off the ground.

Today, the three of us had a long conference call to figure out how we can help people cut through the crap and get their business off the ground in 2008.  We identified several pitfalls and misconceptions many people have about making money on the 'Net.

We talked about what people really need to know, the tools they need to have, and what they must do to be successful.  We analyzed what has made each of us successful and identified the missing pieces for most budding online entrepreneurs.

When all was said and done, we decided to team up and reveal all in a very special program. Save the date...December 17 at 6 p.m. Eastern Time.  More information to follow.

You can get a hint of what The Blog Squad thinks is important in our lastest issue of Savvy eBiz Tips!

Southwest Airlines Team Blog

During the Thanksgiving holiday I had the good fortune to spend quite a bit of time at the airport waiting for my flight to Northern California to be cleared for take off. The Burbank airport was socked in with uncharacteristic fog and all flights were delayed about 2 hours.

Fortunately, the folks at Southwest were very communicative about the delay and ended up accommodating my request to change flights so I could fly to a different airport and meet my family on time for our Thanksgiving celebration. I fly Southwest a lot and I cannot remember having a bad experience with them.

But that's beside the point. While hanging out at the airport at 6:30 a.m., I decided to catch up on some podcasts. One of my favorites is Marketing Voices, weekly perspectives on social media marketing. The interviews with major players in the Web 2.0, social media and marketing arena are always enlightening, informative and interesting.  At approximately 10-15 minutes, they pack a lot in and are perfect those moments when you have some time to kill.

The first podcast in my list happened to be with Paula Berg, the PR Manager for Southwest.  Paula was being interviewed about Southwest's popular blog, Nuts about Southwest, and their team approach to blogging.

Lijit Helps Your Readers Search Your Online Universe

At the BlogWorld Expo, I had a chance to spend some time talking with Tara Anderson of Lijit. Today, I finally had a chance to explore their product and add it to all my blogs.

Lijit is a personal search engine for all your online sites and profiles. You create the search engine by adding URLs for every site you want to include such as: your blog(s), MySpace, del.icio.us account, Digg account, Flickr, LinkedIn profile, YouTube, Twitter and many more social networking sites.

I was able to create a search engine that includes The Blog Squad's online universe of websites, blogs and other social networking sites. You can also include sites in your network of contacts, if you want.  In our case, we want to keep people in our universe so I would not add any outside sites.  Although, you could probably enter affiliate URLS -- I'll have to test that.

I've installed the HTML code on our blogs (in a TypeList), so when you are looking for content The Blog Squad has created, all the sites and blogs we have will be included in the search and the relevant links will be in the results. You can include web pages in addition to blog posts.

You can use the default search widget or customize it to match your own site.

I love Lijit and it's FREE!

Guest Bloggers on CoachEzines.com

Patsi is on vacation this week but that doesn't mean her blog CoachEzines is languishing unattended.  She invited several guest bloggers to post while she's away.  Check out a couple of great articles posted now:

Rich Brooks: Doin' the Biz Blog Boogie: Two steps to profits

John T. Unger: What to Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Public Speaking Can Earn You Big Bucks

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about what I missed at the Mega Speaking Empire conference. I'm always blown away by how much money the speakers can make when they have an excellent back end system in place.

Yesterday while on a 6 mile training walk (running is out for now since I pulled a calf muscle), I listened to a call I missed with our mentor Tom Antion. He gave a detailed, step by step account of how he will make $1,000,000 over the long term just from the one 90 minute presentation he gave at Mega Speaking. Of course Tom is a master and has been speaking for a long time so he's honed his skills.  But it's not rocket science.

Aside from going into all the necessary prep and strategies to make the sales, here's how he'll earn nearly 1 million bucks from one gig:

1. Onsite sales during the event - $213,000 (mentor program and products
2. Sign up for private label shopping cart (600 people got a CD and ebook) - $150,000 over 5 years
3. Commission on mentee program (assuming only 10 out of 43 people who formed over $5,000 at the event, follow through) - $500,000
4. 50 people sign up for AmazingPublicSpeaking Membership site @ $20/mon (assume they stay in for one year - $12,000
5. Word of mouth referral for more speaking gigs that will cycle through this exact process - $50,000 to $250,000

Now you may think this is all pie in the sky, right?