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Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Jeff Diskin, Senior Vice President of Brand Performance for Hilton Hotels.  In his position, Diskin is responsible for providing strategic brand direction for the Hilton full service brand, targeting market share growth, meeting revenue targets, overall brand positioning, brand marketing, and establishing and maintaining brand standards. Prior to his appointment as Senior Vice President, Diskin served as President, Chief Operating Officer – Hilton HHonors Worldwide, and was responsible for the worldwide marketing and operations of the award-winning Hilton HHonors hotel guest loyalty program. He joined Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1989 as Manager of Business Programs, and later was promoted to Director of Business Programs for the company. Prior to joining Hilton, Diskin held a variety of account service, customer service, and creative management positions at Marketing Performance & Innovation (MPI), a subsidiary of United Airlines.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.

I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.

On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.

Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.

Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?

Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.

About the Author

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.

Web services are still really big at Microsoft. I can't wait for the public releases of Indigo to make this all much easier to do. On the MSDN and SDK teams there has been a lot of talk about exposing web services, adopting RSS as a standard syndication mechanism, etc.  I distinctly remember in the V1 .NET Framework when Jeff Richter worked with Jim Gray to create the TerraServer web services.  This is really a great use of a simple API backed by a huge system that provides real value that you would never want to try to build yourself. Looks like they are still up at http://terraservice.net/webservices.aspx  The API is pretty much the same as in 2000... that is goodness!!

Google seems to have a pretty straight forward set of APIs via a web service too.  http://www.google.com/apis/  It is great to see them support VB with their samples.  I can't seem to find the MSN Search web services...maybe someone can point me to them.

Where are you successfully using web services?

What are the next big ideas for the services in the consumer space?

Thoughts, rants, and raves welcomed. -Bret

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Susanne Lyons, CMO of Visa USA. Susanne is responsible for all aspects of brand, advertising and marketing services for one of the world’s most successful payments companies, and serves on the company’s Executive Management Committee as Chief Marketing Officer. She has held senior marketing and general management roles at some of the largest financial services companies in America. She also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. In her ten year career at Schwab, she held various marketing and general management positions, including Enterprise President of Retail Client Services, where she was responsible for 4000 customer service employees.

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.

Communicating with your Clients and Prospects
Most people talk about different things with different people. With one friend the conversation might usually focus on relationships, while with another, perhaps talk turns more naturally to movies, books, sports or politics.

You would be unlikely to appeal to your relationship-discussing friend if you were to engage in a monologue about your opinion of our current political leaders. However, if you started in with that same screed to your politics-loving friend, he or she would greet it with a smile that says "let the games begin!"

The same theory applies to communicating with your customers and prospects. "One of the most important things to keep in mind when developing your campaign is relevance, says Yael Penn, Principal of Imagine Creative Marketing. "If you send a message recipients are interested in receiving, you will get their attention and your campaign will be a success. However, if your message is not relevant to their interests or current needs, they will most likely ignore it, or even worse, unsubscribe from your database and you'll never be able to communicate with them again!"

Segmenting your Database
So now you may be thinking, "Not all of the people in my database have the same interests, what to do?" Before you send out a campaign, you should segment your database into several groups of people who share specific traits, whether it be age, gender, hobbies, job function, purchase history, etc. Take whatever information you already have about the people in your database and put it to good use. This exercise will also give you some insight as to the type of information you will want to gather moving forward to better segment your database in the future.

Then, once you're satisfied with the way you've segmented your database you can create a message that will be relevant to each of those groups. "A lot of people make the mistake of creating email campaigns that appeal to themselves, rather than their target audience," says Penn. "The more you know about your customers, the more you can customize the message, look and feel to better speak to the people you are marketing to."

Enhancing your existing database
When you went through the exercise of segmenting your database for the first time, you probably thought about what type of information would be helpful to have to better communicate with your customers and prospects. Make a list of the most important things (e.g., age, gender, magazines subscriptions, job function, industry, geo) and incorporate these questions into all of you opt-in forms and order forms. The fields should be the same across the board. That way, you consistently collect the relevant information from all new customers and prospects. If you are able to create drop down menus for these fields to standardize the way information is fed into your database, even better.

Once you've incorporated everything into your opt-in and purchase forms, you might want to send out a survey to your existing database to gather this missing information. An enticing premium will increase your response rate. But remember, the premium should be enticing to your target audience, not yourself.

In addition, it is very important to keep good records of what people are buying, when and for how much. These sorts of buying patterns, combined with demographic data, will also prove very valuable for future marketing campaigns.

Communicating with your database on a regular basis
This is where the demographic information and the buying records are going to come in handy. Let's say you sell gloves, hats and scarves. Some of your customers have purchased red women's gloves but not the matching red hat and a red scarf. So you might send them an email with information on a special for the matching red hat and red scarf. However, you will probably want to send a different email to the women who purchased the grey gloves and a different email with an offer for men's accessories to the men in your database. "You should customize your permission-based email marketing efforts to appeal to specifics," says Dan Forootan, President of the StreamSend Email Marketing Service. "By doing this you can greatly increase both your sales and revenue."

"Its important to communicate with your customers and prospects on a regular basis," adds Penn. "but you need to have a good reason for communicating with them, one that brings value in some way. If you're opt-out rate is high, it's a good indication that its time to rethink your messaging as well a how frequently you are communicating with your database.

Track your campaigns
Tracking the results of your campaigns will enable you to determine what's working and what's not. One easy way to do this is to incorporate a field in all your forms called "offer code". Assign a specific code to each email campaign you send out and be sure to give people an incentive to use the offer code when responding.

After each campaign expires you should analyze the results, including how many people you sent the email to, how many emails were delivered, how many people clicked through and how many people opted-out (most email marketing systems will give you these stats). In addition, if you look at the number of people who responded using the campaign offer code, you will be able to calculate the campaign response rate.

Last but not least!
As you are gathering more and more information about your customers, you can use this information to "paint a picture" of your "ideal customer". These are the people who bring you the most profits and you definitely want more customers like these!

Neil Anuskiewicz is the Marketing Manager of EZ Publishing. In addition to developing custom web applications, EZ PUblishing is the creator of the StreamSend Email Marketing permission-based service.

Blogging live today from the American Marketing Association Hot Topic: Ahead of the Curve – High Tech Trends in Marketing

Dave noted an interesting shift when it comes to consumers trying to own the brand, such as in a recent case with Southwest airlines, where Operations gets involved and takes precedence over marketing and the 'designed' brand experience. Customers tried to take control of the brand experience, Southwest's operations team shut the customers down. What's a marketer to do?

The real magic in consumer marketing is in the consideration cycle, specifically in the consideration phase, where word-of-mouth is an HUGE component. The biggest question that you need to answer for the consideration phase is:

Would my customer recommend my company/brand/product/service?

Who likes podcasting? People that have a story to tell!

How many of you have an 'audio recorder' in your home? ....hmm, let me bust out the old cassette recorder.

How many of you have a video recorder? Oh, yeah, got the video/digital/web camera right over here!

Video is powerful. And gaining traction.

Dave talks about education marketing (vs. an infomercial). Infomercial are pitching a product, where as 'education marketing' is all about getting after the things that customers are really interested and helping them be more effective in their complex purchases. It's about really helping customers through it. It's not for everyone. If you're not a category leader, or don't have a product that warrants an educated purchase, then don't bother. This is not for you.

Technorati Tags: AMA Hot Topic

I have been using the MSN Search service in its beta form for several months. To be 100% honest here, I started using it primarily because I work for Microsoft, but I was also very curious to see how the MSN search folks were doing. I know some of the folks working on that team and they are really pushing the Windows platform hard to make this competitive.

It took me a while of switching back and forth between the MSN search beta and Google to prove to myself that I wasn’t wasting time using MSN search.  I wasn’t. Here are my approximate, unscientific results:  about 60% of the time I find what I am looking for on either site on the first page within three searches, about 20% of the time I find it faster on MSN and about 20% of the time I find it faster on Google.  I also use the site tag (site:msdn.microsoft.com) on either search for MSDN specific searches. 

So for now, I am 85% switched to search.msn.com and my theory here is that that they are still just learning how to make search work…so MSN should be better a bit faster rate, right?   I still like the fact that it is easier to type “google” + Ctrl + Enter to get to Google (especially on other peoples machines), but now that the MSN search is the default on the “msn” + Ctrl + Enter… it is a wash.

I use them both a lot and can’t imagine trying to write code without them any more. So I am basically a convert and use http://search.msn.com most of the time.

So, without meaningless rants, what do you think is good and bad for developers about either MSN or Google search?  What can we ask them do to make our lives better? 

Tina Valiedi is the Executive of Marketing and Chief Editor of MPStrategies Firm,a company whose breakthrough service unleashes the power of the internet to drive hidden potential clients to your site. For more marketing how to information visit: http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com

Search engine marketing, internet marketing, google, yahoo.

Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.

While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.

It will help you:

• increase your traditional search engine rankings;
• improve your online visibility by making your content available where people are increasingly searching for new content, such as RSS search engines and content aggregation sites;
• drive traffic from other websites covering your topic, by helping you make your content available at these websites more easily.

Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites

The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.

Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.

Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for ? but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.

But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?

Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.

The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.

Google and Yahoo! know it too ? their own news engines are among the top of breed.

But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?

Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.

And so on ?

Why this matters to you?

If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic ? traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.

And the RSS connection?

Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.

In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.

And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.

Late, late, late on a Tuesday night almost two weeks ago, we re-launched FeedBurner.com with much-needed updates to the design, content and overall direction.

Traci already commented on the strategic importance of the new site, while Rachelle provided a more personal account.

But as the designer and half-developer (Rachelle did the other half — actually, probably more than half — with great skill and speed), I’m going to share a couple of “behind the scenes” details that I find super neat. Hopefully you’ll feel the same way.

Powered By FeedBurner

Going in to this project, two requirements became clear:

1. Traci (our marketing director) needed the ability to make content updates without routing all changes through the design team.

2. Many types of content needed to be reused in slightly different settings and formats around the site.

To address these requirements, we came up with the idea of modular content — basically, little nuggets of content that can be randomized, subscribed, inserted and updated anywhere.

For a couple of content types — blog posts, publisher buzz, press releases — we used feeds and our very own BuzzBoost service to repurpose content wherever we needed it on the site (mmm, dog food). For others, we generated custom blocks of static HTML or Javascript and included those in the JSPs that contain forms, session information (“You are signed in as…”) and other application components.

Of course, we had to generate all of this content somewhere…

Powered By MovableType

We’re using MovableType to store and publish the press releases, in the news, events, corporate backgrounder, stats, Publisher Buzz, and of course our blog, Burning Questions. Our MovableType installation is rigged up with a variety of templates that publish static files in HTML, Javascript and Atom formats — all of which are then pulled into the pages like I mentioned above.

One of the complaints people have about MovableType — that it creates static files by default — is actually a huge advantage here. We’re able to publish flat, lightweight static files to a single server, then pull in these files in a variety of ways across our distributed server environment.

Elegant, dual-float layout

When I was first learning CSS, doing multi-column layouts was always the hardest part. Even two-column layouts seemed tricky, weighing the pros and cons of various approaches and never being totally satisfied with the end result.

Then I got floats. Like, really got them. It was Doug Bowman’s slides from this presentation that secured my understanding and I haven’t fretted about CSS layouts since.

On the new FeedBurner.com, everything but the home page uses a classic dual-float, two-column layout. I set a width on both columns in the CSS, then assigned float:left on the left column and float:right on the right. Finished with a clear:both footer, it’s a solid layout that works regardless of which column is longest.

A new approach to navigation

While many sites feature massive navigation (practically a site map), we took a page from Flickr’s design books this time around and divided our navigation into two sections. A high-priority “primary” navigation and a lower-priority “secondary” navigation are based on prominence, not hierarchy, which helps focus the page and not overwhelm people with choices.

We also made heavy use of in-text hyperlinking across sections, to encourage exploration without forcing folks to grok and traverse our site architecture via the navigation.

Coming soon

Perhaps the best things to come out of this redesign process haven’t arrived yet. As a result of our extensive brainstorming and planning, we have tons of ideas and a general roadmap for web site improvements over the coming months.

And now, with the addition of Rachelle Bowden to our team, we have the manpower womanpower to get it done.

Questions? Comments?

Use the comment form. As always, I love to hear from you!

Disclaimer: This post is about (gulp!) the Internet. If even the idea of putting up a real estate website for lease options leads makes you sleepless then wait for the next post on Hotlines etc that don’t require you to even have a computer. :-)

How to use the Internet to attract buyers for your Lease Options:

There is a pretty big section in most newspapers, week after week, called Rent To Own in the Real Estate Section. Some newspapers call the section Lease Option also.

You will also see ads targeting to prospects with bad credit saying something to the effect that if you have been turned down by the mortgage companies – call us to get the home of your dream.

As a side note I am not a big fan of Land Contracts in Michigan. The foreclosure process that is required to kick out a non-paying Land Contract buyer who bought your home and then defaulted is long and governed by the same laws in Michigan that govern a bank foreclosures.

Although in certain circumstances (property being vacant) you can accelerate the eviction and some astute investors who play in the Land Contract world have told me that they add a eviction clause in their custom made Land Contracts – I have yet to see one contract in reality.

So some of the companies in Michigan who advertise and focus especially on bad credit / home ownership themes might be selling a 12 / 18 month Land Contract deal which gets the seller cashed out at a later date via a refinance. So keep that in mind when you are reading these ads.

Rent To Own Ads are pretty much 100% Lease Option ads and it is a good idea to check them out in your local newspaper before you do anything so to get a feel of the marketing.

Very very few real estate investors use the Internet to market their lease options which if you choose to do so does gives you a pretty good advantage over your competition in your local city. This is how it works:

1. Run advertisements consistently (more on classified ads later) in your local newspaper. I said “local” and “consistently” – two very important and precious words to keep in mind. Also you want to run these ads EVEN when you have NO house at the moment to Lease Option (more on that strategy later also).

2. Direct your prospects to your website.

3. Your website has pictures (lots of them), virtual tour if you want to really blow them away, description of the house with the list of all the upgrades you have done, any promotion you are running (free appliances, gift gas card etc), lease details such as monthly payments, Option number and finally the most important thing of all….

4. An invitation to join your Lease Option Buyer List. So lets say 10 people come to your website as a result of an ad that you ran in your local newspaper.

Well technically you can only sell your 1 home to one out of 10 but the other 9 are still in the market to buy something. May be they don’t like “that” house but who is to say that will not like the second house that you put up next month.

Entice them and ask them to join your Hot Lease Option Upcoming Houses Notification List so they get priority notification even before the house hits the classified section.

Sort of a Pocket Listing Invitation if you want to use the REO slang.

Understand that this strategy is advanced and mostly not used by anybody. Everybody wants to wait till they have a house or worse when the house is done.

The term you need to remember in real estate is Build To Suit – if you doing this, week in, week out your market will tell you what kind of houses you should be looking for.

This is the beauty of having a website and use it for more to tell you what the market wants in your local Michigan city instead of thinking about your website as something to sell that ONE house that you have right now.

I know it might sound hard to believe at first try but really most investors get so tied up in “doing” that deal that they have burning a hole in their head that they forget to build a business.

Nothing personal – just a fact of life. All entrepreneurs go through it. I did too in the beginning.

5. These are some of the things that you should be asking at your site from your site visitors – name, email, number of bedrooms in the house they want to get, basement preference, brick or frame, garage preference, city preference, if you are operating in a city which is comparatively big – it would help to ask a more specific question for example if you see Detroit ads they will mention something like East Side or West Side preference.

Where can you advertise on the Internet to get leads?

1. Detroit Craig’s List; at http://detroit.craigslist.org Free

2. Google Base: http://base.google.com Free

3. Google / Yahoo will be a pain the rear to do and get some leads because you are competing against everybody and their mother selling a $20 book on how to do lease options. Very hard to do Pay Per Click ads and get some leads out of there – not to mention expensive.

4. The thing that I am watching closely is the evolution of Google Local ads that will let you target and run really local ads on Google, which will be really effective for our kind of business.

5. For Sale By Owner sites: cheap prices for the most basic packages. Owners.com is a good example. The whole idea is to get people come to your Lease Option website.

6. EBay – will cost money to run - $150 at least. Plus my feelings about EBay are that it is more suited toward building an Investor List than attracting local homebuyers.

Where can you advertise offline to get Lease Option leads?

I am very old fashioned when it comes to real estate leads. May be the reasons that the damm $26 ads have made me so much money. Real estate is a Local game.

Seriously doubt that a guy in L.A. is thinking about buying a 3 bedroom in Redford. But there are renters in Redford with kids in Redford schools and mom & dad working in Dearborn and Sterling Heights.

They are reading the Sunday’s Free Press and Redford Observer – may be a small percentage looks on the net – may be it is a big percentage; there is a no hard data available anywhere that can pinpoint where most of the people are looking for Lease Option deals.

But I would suggest to you that do both – with 1-2 Knockout punch:

Punch #1: Use the free resources – Google Base; Detroit Craig’s List initially till you close on some deals, put some new money in your business checking account and then think about spending some money on the Internet. Since both of the above are free (at least for the time of writing this)

Punch #2: Spend you money where it will get you the biggest Return on your Advertising Dollars – your local newspapers. In the above example – run small ads driving people to your website in BOTH newspapers – Detroit News and Redford Observer – I repeat run ads in not one but both newspapers.

Sometime I get emailed about the cost of running these ads – well I worry about what comes back to my bank account and not too much on what I have to spend.

As long as coming in number is bigger than going out number – all is good. You can charge the advertising on your business credit card and pay it once the house is Lease Optioned off.

Or you can close one deal and take $500 off right from the top to spend it on advertising on your next deal. The real big mind shift that most entrepreneurs never make is not to think of advertising / marketing as an expense but as investment to build their business.

There are 2 big things in my business I spend money like it is going out of style – my education and my advertising. As long as I feed these two dragons, all is good in Planet Ijlal.

Website Domain Name Tips:

Spend some time thinking of a good and short domain name for your website. Rule of thumb is that keep it within 21 characters with the dot COM thing so it fit in one line.

Newspapers classified sections have a notorious tendency to break down the name in 2 lines if it is long and put a hyphen in the middle. I don’t have to tell you that that becomes a different name.

I had this experience personally one time when my ForeclosureTour.com ad became Foreclosure-Tour.com in two lines. Suffice to say that I did not get any leads that week.

So keep it within 20-21 characters and you will be in the limit. Also you don’t have to use www moniker anymore. I don’t use it anymore. www.MarkIjlal.com or MarkIjlal.com work the same way.

Also I hate long winded domain names – abcpropertyinvestmentsgroup.com is a great tribute to your LLC’s name but come on…. One of my coaching group member Lou Provanzano got a cool name recently for his Detroit deal – www.DetroitOnTheMove.com which gets full marks for originality and sounding good when you say it, print it and leave it on your voice mail.

And yes I am guilty of having long names in the past too – some of them are so crappy that I am actually embarrassed to share them here.

But the point is you want to have a good name; should spend some time on it, make a list of 10-20 names; ask your significant other, if you are in my coaching group, email me the names before you blow the insignificant amount of money needed to reserve them via Godaddy.com. Get a second opinion. This is how the world will see and your business. It is worth spending some time on.

How to get your Lease Option Website Designed:

This is the part where most will hesitate because they are still thinking big dollars when it comes to websites. In 2006, websites are so cheap that there is no excuse left for not to have one.

Where can you get a decent site made?

1. Do you have kids? Do you have neighbors who have kids? Do you have nieces, nephews, and little cousins? Know anybody who goes to a high school??? Every High School in America has a clique of geeks who can design a better-looking site than most web design firms out there.

I have personally hired 16 year olds – one time even flew one from Denver, CO to Michigan to work for two weeks on a business that I used to have. I had one 18 year old actually move to metro Detroit from U.P. to work on a project.

These kids were smarter, harder working and had a better work ethic than most grown ups I have worked with in the last 10 years. They get it. And they love doing this stuff and putting it for the world to see it.

I met an 18-year-old two years ago who was designing websites for Detroit Hip Hop acts – his sites could go heads up with a $50,000 site – he was doing this for $10 per hour.

Ask anybody who is going to high school and is between 14-18 in your life. They know a geek who can whip up a world class website for you in 7 days for probably pennies.

2. You can always go the outsourcing route and use a website a www.elance.com or www.rentacoder.com which will let you post up for free what you are looking for; bunch of companies (most of them in India / China and Eastern Europe) will put up competitive bids. They all have reviews on the previous work they have done; read them and give one the site to do.

If you are totally lazy and don’t want to do anything at all – then spend couple of hours trolling Google and Yahoo and find a website on lease options that you like and then tell whomever is doing your site to make your site look like them.

And for crying out aloud don’t copy blatantly but use it for inspiration and ideas. Most people like me use a copyright protection service that trolls the web looking for lift offs.

When we find somebody cutting and pasting our stuff – we get him or her shut down. I did that to bunch of bogs already that were just copying and pasting my content on their sites.

Next Part 5: How to figure out your Cashflow Payments, Exit Strategies that nobody wants to hear about but they sure do work, the absentee owner thing.