Without good traffic to your site, it’s sitting alone on the web like a gas pump in the middle of an Arizona desert 100 miles from the nearest town.  Sure you might sell a couple of gallons of gas every other month, but you’ll NEVER make any real money.

If you have any kind of online business, the #1 secret to success is going to be driving sufficient amounts of targeted traffic to your offer.  Without it, no matter how spiffy your website is, no matter how powerful your offer is, no matter how nice of a person you are, you aren’t going to do any business and make any money.

The same thing goes for Twitter.  If you are a Twitter user, you probably are always trying to get more followers, right?  The more followers you have, the more people that see the Tweets that you’re putting out there.

I just came across a very powerful right-to-the-point video that shows you step by step how to drive hoards of FREE TARGETED TRAFFIC to your website…traffic that will buy what you’re selling!

Get it while it’s almost FREE.  This amazing video will be going up to $47 soon.

Once you get traffic generation down, there’s nothing to stop you from making a killing on the web.

This is a fantastic event and I highly encourage anyone that’s remotely interested in Social Media to attend.  They have workshops on Podcasting, Video, Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.   Pittsburgh Podcamp 3 was the first Podcamp I ever attended and after witnessing it and learning as much as I did in two short days, I can confidently say that I’ll never miss a future Podcamp.

• WHEN: Saturday, October 10 through Sunday, October 11, from 9 AM to 4 PM each day
• WHERE: The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, 420 Boulevard of the Allies, 15219
• WHO: New media experts, new media creators, aspiring new media creators, communications and PR personnel, and you!
• HOW MUCH: Free!

It’s a wonderful two days of sharing and learning.  Don’t miss it!

Go to Google.com and enter a string like this:

site:twitter.com “bio” AND “pittsburgh, pa” AND (“marketer” OR “marketing”)

Obviously, replace the location and the keywords with whatever you want to search for, but the above example would display everyone from Pittsburgh, PA that had marketer or marketing listed in their bio.

Needless to say, you can imagine all of the applications for a search mechanism like this:

• Find great local prospects for your business
• Find potential JV partners
• Find targeted prospects in a distant town where you want to grow your business

The possibilities are really up to your imagination.

If you are an Internet Marketer and live around Pittsburgh or know of any Internet Marketers in the Pittsburgh area, please make them aware of the group.  We don’t have any meetups planned yet but hopefully we will in the near future.

And now for a prediction…

SMS Text Messaging  will become a very important form of B to C communication in the United States over the next few years.  It has already hit the tipping point in Asia and it won’t be long until we start to climb up that trend ourselves.  Remember how email used to be the “Killer App” of the web?  Mark my words that SMS Text Messaging will very soon be considered a killer app.  On a sad note, it won’t last for long…   Because just like email, SMS spam will become a very serious and annoying problem very quickly.  But the businesses that are early adopters and learn early how to build their SMS opt-in list and message through the platform effectively will make a killing before this technology gets overused and tossed aside for the next big thing.

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve just started the 30-Day Challenge.  This is a free 30-Day course in Internet Marketing.  I’ll be learning online marketing techniques from one of the best in the business, Ed Dale.  This is really an amazing event considering the level of professionalism that the information is presented in.

Of course, me being a drummer, it’s also interesting to note that Ed Dale is a guitar enthusiast who happens to make millions marketing on the Internet.  Come January 1st, I should be able to help my team do much better marketing online than they are today.  December, here we come!!

Click HERE to learn more.

I know when I first started working on my own full-time from home, I thought my days would be long and I’d have plenty of time to get a lot more accomplished than I did when I worked a full-time job.  What’s funny though is my days go by so quickly now that I can’t possibly comprehend where the time goes.  Does that mean that I love what I do and it’s fun and not work which makes the time go more quickly?  I’m sure that’s a very big part of it.  But the fact remains that at the end of many days, I look back and see that too much of my time was wasted on non-income producing activities.

The first step to fixing a problem is realizing that you have a problem.  At least then you know what needs fixed.  Once I realized I had a problem, I started researching ways to solve my productivity dilemma.  The first thing I learned is that I needed to get good at figuring out what activities were income generating and which were not.  With some activities, it’s very easy to tell.  With others, as you’ll see, it’s not easy at all.

To help give you some guidelines, here are some classic examples of non-income generating activities.  Ask yourself if you’re guilty of any of these?

• Surfing the web
• Getting ready to get ready (aka “Saddling Up” which is not riding)
• Reorganizing something that doesn’t need reorganized
• Chatting with business partners about non-critical things
• Reviewing company material
• Checking email
• Cleaning up your desk or your office
• Attending conference calls or webinars
• Growing your social network on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. (disclaimer-this can be income generating but it’s longer term income, not much short-term income potential)
• Reading a self-development book (this activity, like the last one, will definitely have an impact on your income but it’s just hard to measure since it will be much longer term)

What are income producing activities?:

• Calling prospects to set appointments or send them info to review
• Doing 3-way calls with your ME’s
• Prospecting / Generating leads
• Presenting the opportunity to prospects in person, on the phone or in a webinar
• Following up with a prospect
• Following up with a new customer or ME
• Training a new ME so he gets moving out of the gate quickly duplicating proper activities

80% of your time should be spent on the above types of activities

Dramatically Increase Income-Producing Activities — Alex Lopez with Sydney-based Quantify Corporation uses a simple technique to double his income-producing activities.  He divides his to-do list into two columns.  Column one is labeled “Non-income Producing Activities” (Red) and Column two is labeled “Income Producing Activities” (Green).  He then forces himself to place a to-do item in one of the two columns.  When he first started, his non-income producing activities outnumbered his income-producing activities by a two to one ratio.  Over time, he’s been able to flip that ratio.  This is an excellent exercise for ALL of us to follow.  As Quantify Corporation’s tagline says “If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.”

The trick is to create your task list for tomorrow as the last thing you do today.  When you get up tomorrow, you can charge head-on immediately into the tasks that you need to accomplish for the day without even thinking about them.  Try it, it REALLY works!!

Some thoughts from others on the importance of their daily agenda…

“The secret of a person’s success is discovered in his daily agenda.” — John C. Maxwell

“The whole purpose of time management is to enable you to have more time to spend with the people you love, doing the things you enjoy.”  — Brian Tracy

“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.” –  Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)

“Every morning when the alarm goes off, we have a totally new opportunity to do what we want with the hours we have been gifted. And we are gifted with that clean slate every day for the rest of our lives.”  –  Hyrum Smith, Originator of the Franklin Planner, 2000

So what are you going to do tomorrow?  Make it count!

Get that info where you can use it!

Have you ever gone to an event like a convention or a large training meeting and come home and forgot most of what you learned there?  That happens to many people, myself included.  So I’ve done a little research on how to combat that problem.

The most effective thing you can do when you come home is to spend a few hours and type up your notes into a document.  During this process, you will cut out the unnecessary fluff in your notes, organize them much better and commit much more of the information to memory.  There’s something about this process, this re-input of the information into your brain so you can pretty it up and type it out into a neat clean document, that causes your brain to absorb much more of it than it was able to the first time around.

So this exercise serves three purposes:

1. Helps you to commit more of the information to memory
2. Makes the information computer searchable
3. Makes the information worthy of filing for future more logical reference (a nice 3 ring binder perhaps?)

Once the info is in your brain, all sorts of new ideas and possible applications to your exact situation will automatically start to form.  That’s when the magic happens and when the true value of the time you invested in the original event is realized.

212 The Extra Degree

If you haven’t seen 212 The Extra Degree yet, you need to take 3 minutes and watch it right now.  It’s very short and worth every second of your time.  The concept is amazingly simple, yet amazingly powerful and applicable to everything we do as entrepreneurs.

Click on the image to watch it now.

I don’t know if you’re a student of self-development or not (I encourage you to become one if you’re not), but many of the great business leaders of our time have talked about being able to visualize success before you can attain success.

“You can bring into your life more power, more wealth, more health, more happiness, and more joy by learning to contact and release the hidden power of your subconscious mind.”
- Dr. Joseph Murphy

“What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”
- Napoleon Hill

The subconscious mind is an incredible thing and you’ll learn that you can actually program your subconscious mind for success.  Yes, it’s like a computer, it can be programmed to give you whatever you want.  Learning how to program it isn’t something that everyone knows how to do, but the good news is that anyone can learn how to do it, and it’s not hard to do.

If you haven’t yet read or watched The Secret, you should.  Some people might think it’s a little out there, but I have to tell you when you start to think about it, it really makes total sense.  Check it out if you haven’t.

Once you’ve read “The Secret”, another book I would recommend is Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, M.D.. (Here’s a link to the Audio-book version version). This book provides even more scientific proof that your subconcious mind controls just about everything about you and your success in life. John Chickness studied with Dr. Maltz himself in the sixties. John will tell you…this works!