MyTradeAmerica.com, the  Los Angeles broker for the dobarter.com network,  largest business barter exchange network in the world, wanted to integrate a modern look and feel and some not so secure social media bells and whistles to integrate with the very large, old, secure dobarter.com system.

The ASP programmers on the other end who administer this huge database were very helpful: now what we did here:

This can be done over and over again very inexpensively: you can choose form thousands of templates to pick a look and theme, the we can do a makeover integrated into the Dobarter.com system to feed your business and modernize your look!

Take a good look at the traceable affiliate program, the social media optimization, the profile building, the. interface seamlessly integrated!

Stunning!  That is the effect that right picture can have on a memory, a moment, a dream, a reality.

To have the ‘what it takes’ to go after professional photography as her career and put herself through college was impressive enough:  I challenge anyone to describe her work as anything other than stunning.  On top of that, she is actually already in her chosen occupation making a living freelancing for wedding pictures as you see here in the Portland Oregon area.  She chose her goal and she achieved it; already at the ripe old age of 28!  It goes to show: hard work and real talent are always employed doing what they love!

My hat is off to Terra Rothman Wedding Photography in Portland Oregon

Because most of my clients were real estate professionals prior to the crash, nobody knows better than I do what it is like to have a viable business one minute, and a lapse in income the next, for a period of about 18 months for me this last time.

This is not the first of these that I have been through: I remember thinking it was over in the seventies when a list of .com start-ups and software and hardware manufacturers saved us.

Let me be the one to remind you: business is cyclical.  there have always been ups and downs in real estate, building, commodities of all kinds, the markets…

Life in general, and business are competitive; but here is a tip: stay busy.   People spend way to much time doing everything other than what they need to be doing – they are backed into a corner with their own inactivity.  All you need to know to compete effectively consistently with everyone in the world is to know what they will never do: and to do it:

• Be consistent
• Be busy
• be reliable
• stay on course
• smile
• keep it positive
• make the extra call
• go the extra mile

I will be here still the next time, and I will try to be more ready.  It is my honor and pleasure to be in the game.

Ideally, I say yes: for some companies including mine one video can serve both purposes.

What do you think?

As a pioneer in search engine marketing in purpose, I have the dubious honor of telling people what is wrong with what they have been doing and why it is not working.  Here is the top ten list of reasons, so don’t shoot the messenger!

1.   When looking at the source code on your website, if you see the tag <frameset you need a new website – this tag was abused by porn and spam purveyors years ago and is death to rankings

2. You are penalized by Google: “I bought back-links, reciprocal links, several domains..”  these things are all bad – outdated SEO techniques and duplicate content  will get you penalized – you will know this applies to you if you are stuck at the top of page 3 of the organic results for your target searches, often these are searches you were once on page 1 for.

3.  You have a static website that requires somebody else to edit and change it: nobody wants yesterday’s news, and Google’s algorithms reflect that.  You must have dynamic content.

4.  Your idiot webmaster put a no-cache tag, meaning that you never show up in any search since that is what we are searching is Google’s cache (database)

5.  You are a do-it-yourself  type and you like to build your own pages in Dreamweaver or Front Page – unless you are an SEO master and a coder with up-to-date skills, you have no business building web-pages if you care at all about traffic or rankings, instead, your website should be in WordPress, which is free, user-friendly, and is an SEO machine properly optimized.

6.  You have a ‘builder site’ – you have bought an incredibly inexpensive or even free alternative which uses a common code base and templates, meaning that your website is exactly like hundreds or thousands of others.

7.  You webmaster has an outdated skill set – resulting in any or all of the above mistakes, and others.

8.  You are lazy, and inconsistent – in order to rank on searches, your website must have value and it must grow on a regular pattern.

9.  You have not built a trail or links that lead to you – this is usually because of any or all of the above, and because nobody will link to a lousy or outdated or static site.

10.  Your website is not the source of an RSS feed – this has become essential for many reasons – most of you do this backward, you build somebody else’ s feed instead of your own, that is why everybody wants to give you a free profile and/or blog.

Today was a good day to be born: Happy Birthday to Al Pacino, Hank Azaria, Renée Zellweger, Jason Lee, Brett Brownson, Israel Rothman, Pamela Fuller & Scott Applebaum.

Happy birthday to me, 56 years young!

Maybe you have a flair for design and some great antiques in the garage.   Maybe you are an exercise and fitness nut.  You may know about nutrition, or be involved with the local chamber of commerce, or local charities.

Whatever your life that you have outside of your job, it behooves you to leverage your marketing activities associated with your primary source(s) of income to create multiple streams of income from your hobbies, passions, whatever it is that you love!