PLEASE NOTE: If you click on a product link on this page and then buy the product, I’m going to make a little bit of money. This is called affiliate marketing. You don’t pay any more for the product; the seller just makes a bit less. This is how the internet works.

If you’re paying attention, you know by now that the FTC has some new rules about how marketers do business, especially when it comes to testimonials and endorsements. This is a good thing. There haven’t been new rules propagated since 1980, several centuries in terms of the internet! There is a lot of information out there if you want to know more – and, of course, lots of opportunities to buy a product to help protect yourself. You can look at the article I wrote for Ezine Articles or just google “new FTC rules” if you want to read more.

This isn’t an article about the rules, per se. It’s more about the reason the FTC needed to make the rules.

It’s just that I was reading an article by Paul Evans of Nicheology (yes, the same as the advertisement over there –>) where he was talking about the great marketer/motivator Zig Ziglar. Apparently, Ziglar suffers from memory loss. His family was discussing Tiger Woods’ problems and teased Ziglar that he was lucky he couldn’t remember all his girlfriends that might get him in trouble (teasing because he was notoriously in love with The Redhead).

His response is something all of should take to heart and live by, a rule for life as well as marketing:

Zig’s response to the comment was, “When you always tell the truth and do the right thing you do not have to have a good memory.”

Just thought I’d share that with you today.

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I finally got around to making up a new header to reflect the change from an eBay focus to general internet work. It’s not going to win any awards, but I think it looks okay. And I made it my ownself!

The main reason for my post today is to tell you about a GREAT page put up by Michael Campbell. It is helping me finally make some sense out of search engine optimization, or SEO.

The basics of SEO shouldn’t really be that hard to understand. It’s simply the information you need to have, the links in and out of your site, the keywords used correctly, etc., to make the search engines find your site and rank it. The problem for me has been that I’m going along just fine and somewhere in the middle of things there’s talk about social networking that seems to be in a foreign language. POW! My brains explode, and I can’t make sense of the rest of the article or conversation.

I know social networking and sites have been important to getting ranked for some time now. And I’m sure that I have a bunch of information tucked away about how to do it. The problem is, none of this seems particularly intuitive. I seems that each web 2.0 site has a different way of doing things: different sign-up, different posting rules, different linking rules, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So I get impatient and my brain shuts down. Not a pretty trait, but there it is.

Today, though, I found a post by Michael Campbell called Jiggling the Web for Instant Search Engine Rankings that put it all together in such a way that I wanted, actually wanted, to learn more. Even if you know tons about SEO and SERPS, this is a worthwile read.

And, be sure to take advantage of the link to the interview given at the bottom of the page. Ken McCarthy interviews Campbell for over an hour. The information in that interview is mind-boggling. I plan to listen to it a few more times so I can have complete notes on all that’s discussed. This is definitely worth the investment of your time.

So, enough for now. Here’s some more information you might find helpful:

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I was reading an online internet marketing ezine today and found something that absolutely smacked up the side of my head. The focus was on getting large tasks done and how that was managed, and this from Mark Twain was quoted:

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

What finally clicked is that this is exactly how I was able to be a successful caterer. You see, in the catering business, it doesn’t matter whether you’re cooking for 50 or for 500. The things you have to do to get the food on the table are exactly the same, just on a different scale. You still have to compute the amount of food you’ll need, compute the time you need to prepare it, shop for the ingredients, and then start cooking. And all of this requires detailed lists, with the individual tasks set out.

For example, if I’m making a caeser salad, my task list would look like this:

Make croutons: cube bread, saute bread in butter and seasonings, crisp croutons in oven

Lettuce: wash, dry, tear

Dressing: chop garlic, coddle egg, mash anchovies, combine with the rest of the ingredients, and chill

Grate or shave the parmesan

The thing about all this is that it’s second nature when I’m preparing food (even now when it’s only our own dinner parties I plan), but it hasn’t been an automatic thing for me to do in my internet business. So that’s something I simply have to incorporate in my workday.

Even writing about the process reminds me of how immensely satisfying it is to cross something off a list, marking it as completed. It’s a tangible way to show progress and to have a visual of how your work is going.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions is to start making lists. I’m off to do just that right now.

Oh, and here are a few more thoughts on getting started.

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