A very powerful and often underutilized psychological trigger is colors.  That’s right good old fashioned, basic colors.  Each color makes us feel a certain way and gives us different impressions on different things.

For this post though we will look at web/internet colors and the way these colors make people feel.

Of course in keeping things simple I’m not going to get into the complete psychology of colors but will give you a brief description of feelings that are associated with certain colors.

White: cleanliness, innocence, creativity, purity, neutrality, simplicity, spirituality, life (Western Cultures), marriage (Western Cultures), death (Eastern Cultures).

For more information on color symbolism and the psychology of colors have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism

Black: power, seriousness, authority, elegance, darkness, stability, strength, sophistication, secrecy, intelligence, death (Western Cultures), evil, mystery, anger, sadness.

Gray: conservative, practical, neutrality, security, maturity, indifference, timeless, reliability, gloominess, old, reserved, sadness, death, depression.

Red: energy, passion, excitement, danger, movement, warning, life, impulse, love, action, giving, adventure

Orange: fun, comfort, happy, creativity, energetic, celebration, warmth, youth, ambition, affordability

Yellow: laughter, curiousity, happiness, playfulness, good times, cheerfulness, optimism, amusement, cowardice, fire

Green: calming, money, wealth, nature, conservative, health, envy, healing, good luck, life, fertility, harmony, generosity, peace, harmony, nurturing, support

Blue: calming, trustworthiness, restful, success, wisdom, seriousness, dependable, calmness, loyalty, power, productive, professional

Purple: royalty, wealth, justice, prosperity, ambiguity, uncertainty, sophistication, luxury, mystery, fantasy, wisdom, dreams, respect, pompous

Pink: love, tenderness, softness, romance, sweetness, calm, innocence, soothing, youthfulness

Brown: readability, primitive, stability, earth, friendship, natural, simplicity, organic, mourning (India)

A lot of people buy domains with dashes and some people swear they won’t touch a domain with dashes in it.  Are domains with dashes any good?  Do they hurt SEO?

The search engines do rank sites with dashes, but you might end up in the google sandbox for a bit because a lot of spammers, scammers, and just all about shady characters use domains with dashes because the regular one isn’t available or they can make it look like they are the normal domain to steal their traffic.

The keywords are viewed by the search engines and you can definitely be ranked for your keywords using domains with dashes and they are definitely a good alternative if you can’t find a decent domain extension with your keywords or decent domain alternative.

Personally I rarely buy domains with dashes because I like people to remember my site.  People forget to add dashes and end up on other sites.  I want them to get to my site the easiest way possible.  Dashes make a domain name harder to remember and you have to be careful when using them.

I have bought dashed domains and used them to quickly get ranked for my chosen keywords but I don’t like them and try to avoid them as much as possible.

First of all if you don’t have a lead capture mechanism on your site you’re missing out on potential sales and leads.  A lead capture mechanism can be as simple as an opt-in box to your mailing list.

Now for the technique.  Let’s assume you created an opt-in box to get people on your mailing list.  Why would I want to sign up for your mailing list?  Normal reasons are coupons, exclusive discounts, more information, etc…

In addition to that we can also give out a free report or ebook.  I know you don’t want to write an ebook.  I don’t either.  That’s why I’m going to tell you how to create an ebook in 5 - 10 minutes.

First things first.  Fire up Word or any word processing program you might have installed.

Second go to article directories.  There are tons of them, but here are a few to get you started:

Ezine Articles

Go Articles

Article Dashboard

Third:  Search for your topic.  For example you do plumbing in Wall, NJ, so you search for plumbing.

Here are some of the great articles I’ve found:

Plumbing Basics

A Short Guide for Plumbing Emergencies

Plumbing Tips - From Thawing Frozen Pipes to General Pipe Repairs

Plumbing Problems and Solutions

Inexpensive Bathroom Remodeling Secrets

Electric showers: Making your bath economical

Emergency Plumbing Service: How To Choose The Best

Plus there are literally hundreds of other articles.  I found these articles in literally two minutes.

The good thing about these article directories is you can use their articles, all you have to do is leave the author information in.

Fourth: Create a cover page in Word (make sure to include your contact information).

Fifth: Pick your favorite articles and copy and paste them into Word, right after your cover page.

Sixth: Use a PDF converter to convert your document into PDF format.  Here are a few free PDF converters:

PDF 995

Primo PDF

Open Office

Seventh: Relax and take a nap.  You’re done.  You’ve created a good ebook with tips you can give your future clients in literally five minutes.

You don’t have to use this technique to create ebooks and reports, if you get stuck on what to write to your mailing list or are in a rush to get a mailing out you can do the same thing for your mailing list.

You can also use the articles on your sites for fast, keyword rich, free content.

Here’s a little secret your own competitors might use against you and even if they aren’t there’s no reason why you can’t do it against them.

Basically you are opening up your competitor’s source code and using it to help you.

I use FireFox so the instructions are open up FireFox go to View, then Page Source.

For Internet Explorer it’s View, then Source.

The reason we’re opening up their source code is because there are important factors for each page for example the title, description and somewhat the metatags.

Since most of the content you can view on the page;  these are the three things you should be focusing on.  Personally I like looking at metatags and harvesting keywords off of them.  Of course viewing the title and description will also help you form ideas for your own.

The major search engines don’t put a big focus or even any focus on the metatags, but sites that are ranking usually use some or most of the keywords in these tags.  If you copy them and include them in your current SEO strategy it will help you rank for more keywords and for their keywords.

Sorry for the long delay in between posts.  I’ve been insanely busy lately, which of course means business is booming.  Which brings me to the point of this post.  How can you make your business boom?

It’s easy look for clients in places you don’t normally look and of course SEO (search engine optimization) helps out a ton.

Business wasn’t exactly slow a few months ago, but I decided to try different tactics in my spare time to drum up added business.  I’m a workaholic so working 16 hours a day doesn’t bother me (as long as it’s not manual labor), but I can’t work 16 hours a day because I do have a family.  The first step I took was figure out a way to turn every day into a 16 hour day without doing 16 hours a day of work.

So I looked around and found tons of unpoached leads and generated several of my own leads (through SEO), a long story short I got myself up to 16 hour days by getting new clients, but my family was almost being neglected, so I decided to have two of me.  In the last month or two, I’ve hired three people.  Two of them I let go because their performance wasn’t up to par with the way I work.  I’m left with one (who’s doing an excellent job), but it’s really making me much more efficient and now there’s more working hours available in the day.  I’ll probably hire someone else because I think having two people help me would be even better and I probably do need two people because I’m creeping back up to those 16 hour work days (and have had several in the last week).

The point of that whole statement was I found leads in unlikely sources, I converted the leads, I hired more help which motivates me to generate even more business (because now more can get accomplished), and I’m going to expand again in the near future because I don’t want to start a waiting list and lose out on customers.  Don’t stop trying to generate leads.  The minute you stop new clients might stop showing up.  Word of mouth can get you tons of clients, but even that can be tapped depending on your business.

I know you’re probably waiting for the unlikely lead source.  Sorry that’s not included here (or for sale).  Look back on some of my posts and you’ll find several ways of creating leads, that work.

SEO won’t let you down no matter how you look at it, SEO being your first form of attack will get you noticed no matter what business it is you do.  There are so many people searching online that the yellow pages…dare I say…is just about obsolete.  I read recently that some companies are planning on doing away with local yellow pages unless you request them.  Online is the place to be.  If you don’t have a website you better get one designed and created now.  I don’t care if you’re a carpenter in Howell or a dentist in Toms River get yourself online now.

Sometimes you need to work harder and then smarter.

Some people think long sales letters and hype pages are the best way to get sales and convert visitors.  While it can be true and it can help, the arguably most important part of your page are bullet points.

I skip through long sales pages and I know a lot of others that do this and go straight to the bullet points after reading a little bit from the first couple of paragraphs.  I don’t have time to spend an hour reading a page.

Bullet points are bold, easy to distinguish from the rest of the content and should have the most important and relevant information in them.

If you aren’t using bullet points in your sales copy you better start now.  Sales pages aren’t one size fits all.  For some demographics they’ll want a long sales letter, others a short sales letter, others prefer video.  The good thing is you can create your page however you want, but don’t forget those bullet points.  Even if someone decides to skip your sales letter or video they will know the main benefits of your product.  If they see a compelling reason within your bullet points they might just read the rest of the page or order.

Don’t skimp on the bullet points and make sure the top reasons to purchase your product are in there.

I just found a great offer for free business cards.

You don’t even need to pay shipping like with VistaPrint.  The only bad thing is it says Printed for Free on the back.  These are good as backup cards if you run out of good business cards or really as business cards in general.  I’m ordering.  Free is always a good price.  I figure free emergency cards can’t be beat.

Did you know that your site’s navigation can also play a role in search engine optimization for your site?  The search engines look for keywords and keyword rich URLs are given added weight in your rankings.

You sell wicker lawn chairs and your page navigation looks like this:

Home

Products

Etc….

Where it says Home you can rename it to Wicker Lawn Chairs Home Page.  Where it says Products a way to get a little more bang for your search engine buck, would be to rename it to Wicker Lawn Chair Products.   Of course this is a simplified example and you should do it to all or most of your URLs as you see appropriate.

The navigation text we are adding is technically called anchor text.  You want your anchor text to have the keywords you’re trying to rank for.  This helps the search engines figure out what’s on your pages, which in turn boosts your rankings a bit.  Anchor text is not only important with on site SEO, but it is also important for off site SEO.

I have a friend that wants to buy a revenue producing site.  He’s doing his homework before he buys, but I’ve been telling him over the last couple of weeks don’t believe everything you see.  A lot of those “gurus” out there and sales pages are complete bullshit.  From the screenshots down to the videos.

Testimonials a lot of times are faked also and even if they’re not the big internet marketing guys play the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” game.

Another thing PayPal fees vary by transaction.  When I see a screenshot of PayPal transactions and the fees are exactly the same for every transaction, that raises a big red flag for me.  PayPal charges you different fees depending on what kind of transaction it is and what kind of account you have.  Usually you won’t be billed at the same rate for every single transaction if you have a ton of transactions.  For more information get it straight from PayPal.

Here’s a quick tutorial for everyone.  You can take this as a warning or you can take it to become a scammer.  Either way it’s up to you what you do with the knowledge.

There are a few ways to get the desired effect.

Technique one:

Go to your favorite website and save the page.  Open the page up in your favorite WYSIWYG editor.

Change the names and numbers.  Save, open up in your friendly browser, get a screenshot.  Done.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Look who's PayPal account this is!

See How Easy it is to Manipulate any of the Fields?

And that’s just one technique.  We still have the Firebug technique.  The javascript code technique.  I haven’t even mentioned videos.  You get the point.  I don’t think the other techniques are necessary.

Pay attention to detail and verify as many details as you can.  There are too many scammers out there.

I decided to take the weekend off from this site.  I normally post every day and lately I’ve been doing everything in real time as opposed to writing in advance (which is what I was doing before).  I’ve decided to post less frequently although I will post on here almost every day.  I have tons of pre-written notes for different topics but some of them go into so much detail it would take hours to formulate a decent post and frankly I don’t have that much free time to spare.  I use my free time to create new sites and stay on top of the latest trends and techniques.

Did you know that there’s a way to do all of your work and in record time?  Do you have some kind of daily task that’s repetitive and that you do every day or almost every day?  Since this is a blog to help your business I have a solution for you.

It’s called using macros.  A macro is basically a screen recording of some work you’ve done previously, except that instead of it just being a recording it actually does the work for you.  There are many programs available that create macros ranging from free to several thousand dollars.  I’ve compiled a list of several of them and most of them have free trials to see if you can use them in your business.

Here are several different macro creating programs:

Quick Macros

EZ Macros

iMacros for Firefox

iMacros

Smack Macro Recorder

Auto Macro Recorder

Journal Macro

WinAutomation

Automation Anywhere

Desktop Macros

You can save literally hours a day and run your business virtually on autopilot if you create the proper macros.

Some of these programs even create executable files that you can use on any computer without having to install any other programs.  Imagine you own a business and know other companies that have the same needs as you.  You can actually sell the macros to other businesses and help them automate everything.  It can be a side business to create extra income.