Thoughts From LBJ Web Design & Consulting

If any of these topics interest you, check out my Bright Hub articles!  I have over 130 articles on Bright Hub now mostly dealing with alternative healing and natural healing.  A few on web development and blogging and even a couple about crafts like cross stitch and knitting.  Bright Hub is a wonderful source of information and all of our articles must live up to some very high guidelines and standards.  We can’t just write anything.  The articles must be referenced appropriately to back up what it says and every article is edited for quality.  Check out my articles here.

Have you or someone you are close to been diagnosed with cancer?

Are you overwhelmed with statistics and treatment options and crucial decisions that need to be made?

Take control of your health and your life with A Cancer Journey Workbook.

Being a cancer survivor myself and someone that has had friends and family suffer from cancer, I know that sometimes the worst part about having cancer is the overwhelming amount of information that goes along with it.  You are inundated with suggestions everywhere you turn from your doctors to your mother in law to the internet.  They all seem to have the answers for you but just as you are completely unique, so is the cancer.  It is your own exclusive brand just for you and how you react to the cancer, the treatments and the medications are also yours alone.  NO ONE can know how you will feel, how your body will react or what the future holds.  They can only give you predictions, not guarantees.

A Cancer Journey Workbook can help you deal with all the options and decisions you face and keep you organized through it all so you are free to fight with all you have.

Download your copy of A Cancer Journey Workbook instantly.

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the hard disk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

If you spend most of your working day thinking “I hate my job” then you’re not alone.

An extensive survey carried out by the Conference Boards Consumer Research Center a couple of years ago suggests that more people are unhappy with their jobs than at any other time the last twenty years.

Most Americans Hate Their Jobs

The statistics vary according to age group, with older people generally being happier in their work. Maybe we’re more likely to have found a job we like as we grow older, or maybe we have just learned to accept our situation for what it is.

The shocking figures are as follows:

o Less than 39 percent of Americans under 25 are satisfied with their jobs

o Less than 45 percent of Americans aged 45 to 54 are satisfied with their jobs

o Less than 50 percent of Americans over the age of 55 are satisfied with their jobs

However, twenty years ago when the survey was first conducted 61 percent of all Americans said they were satisfied with their jobs. It looks like things are getting worse.

The Problem of Unhappy Employees

If so many employees hate their jobs then this isn’t good for anyone, including their employers. How is an unhappy employee going to be motivated enough to be productive and produce quality work? The answer is that they’re not.

Unless we’re happy, inspired and fulfilled by the work we do then it just turns into drudgery and this is what so many people are experiencing on a daily basis.

Spending 8+ hours a day doing a job we hate isn’t going to make us into happy productive people. It’s turning most people into bitter, unhappy people who dream of quitting their jobs so they can spend time doing something they enjoy, but they don’t know how.

So What’s the Answer?

The answer isn’t simple I’m afraid but we do have a number of choices. We can continue to look for work which we might find more rewarding and many people are happy to do this. However, I don’t believe this is a real solution for most people.

Some people might eventually find a job which they find bearable or even enjoy sometimes, but that’s about as good as it gets for most employees.

Others dream of winning the lottery, this being their only hope of ever quitting their job. They call the lottery a “poor peoples tax” and that’s all it is. The odds of winning are shockingly low and it shouldn’t even form part of your plans for quitting your day job.

The Most Powerful Solution

The most powerful of solutions is to find something you’re passionate about first and foremost. It could be a hobby, interest or just something you’d like to pursue.

Then you need to turn it into a side business with which you can test the water in your spare time when you’re not working your day job.

Don’t expect it all to work out at the first attempt, it most probably won’t. Be persistent, try different things, learn all you can about your chosen business, learn all you can about your customer demographics, find out what they actually want before trying to sell them anything, change your mindset away from being an employee, develop a business mindset.

Most importantly have dreams of doing something you’re passionate about for a living, write down those dreams and take action to make those dreams a reality.

It’s Within Your Capabilities

If I were to tell you that all this is easy then I’d be misleading you, it isn’t. However, neither is it beyond your capabilities, you can do it and many people do.

I truly believe that the first step to freeing yourself from a job you hate is by learning that there is another way. Remove yourself from your old ways of thinking, after all it’s those old ways of thinking that got you into this situation in the first place.

Develop a business mindset and you’ll see things differently. You’ll see opportunities that you previously didn’t know existed, you’ll make your own opportunities and you’ll act upon them. It’s at this point that life becomes exciting again.

Too many people accept a job they hate as a way of life. Don’t be willing to accept this. Your day job is something temporary you need right now to pay the bills. But that’s all it is, your energies should be focused on something more productive, making your dreams a reality.

Have you or someone you are close to been diagnosed with cancer?

Are you overwhelmed with statistics and treatment options and crucial decisions that need to be made?

Take control of your health and your life with A Cancer Journey Workbook.

Being a cancer survivor myself and someone that has had friends and family suffer from cancer, I know that sometimes the worst part about having cancer is the overwhelming amount of information that goes along with it.  You are inundated with suggestions everywhere you turn from your doctors to your mother in law to the internet.  They all seem to have the answers for you but just as you are completely unique, so is the cancer.  It is your own exclusive brand just for you and how you react to the cancer, the treatments and the medications are also yours alone.  NO ONE can know how you will feel, how your body will react or what the future holds.  They can only give you predictions, not guarantees.

A Cancer Journey Workbook can help you deal with all the options and decisions you face and keep you organized through it all so you are free to fight with all you have.Click here to get your copy today!

By no means is this article intended to be a road map to a highly optimized website. This article is intended to highlight the important aspects of on and off page optimization of websites that need to rank well in the organic search engines.

Fifty percent of SEO is mechanical and should follow tried and tested white hat principals that cater to the search engines and their algorithm. The other fifty percent of efforts that are deployed to influent the organic search listing is gut feeling. Highly successful SEO professionals develop a 6th sense that incredibly is in tune to the search engines. At some point in a SEO professionals careers good SEO’s just know when a web page is right and feels good. All the SEO tools and programs will not make you a good SEO, you may gain some success but the edge that is needed to truly be competitive comes with experience and having spent a great deal of time wrestling with the search engines.

1. Page Title – The very first thing of importance that the search engines see when crawling a web page is the page title. Too many web designers and SEO professionals simply put the company name and something like this ABC Plumbers, services. This means absolutely nothing to the search engines. The page title should clearly define what the web page is about. Further more you are not selling ABC Plumbers, you are selling plumbing services. It is a hard concept for most people to grasp, but your company name should not be first in the page title. The search engines give more importance to words that are in the beginning the page title. So with this little tidbit in mind the page tiles should read something along the lines of commercial plumbing services, ABC Plumbers.
2. Meta Description – The second thing of importance to the search engines as they crawl your web site is the meta description. Once again the meta description should further clearly define what that individual web page is about. The meta description should once again contain keywords or keyword phrases that outline what this page is about.
3. Content – The content on the individual web page should and needs to follow the theme you have already developed with the page title and the meta description. The content should contain the keywords and keyword phrases that you are trying to gain ranking for in the search engines. A well written and optimized web page should have at least 400 words.
4. H-Tags – This is where most web designers truly fall short. Many web designers use the h-tags to style sentences. This is not the intended purpose of the H-tags. The proper use for a h-tag is to draw attention to content for the search engines. I cannot count how many times I have come across the h-tags being used to style a sentence like “Call me”! Think about it call me means nothing to the search engines and you are certainly not marketing call me! The H-tags when used properly are like red flags to the search engines saying here is an important piece of content. Use the keywords that the web page is about in your h-tags. H-tags can be a very powerful tool if used as they are intended and implemented properly.
5. Alt Tags – Alt Tags are attached to graphics and images so in the event that the browser used cannot display the images, it give the viewer an idea about what the image was. Proper use of Alt Tags fine tunes a web page. Your Alt Tags should contain keywords that are relevant to the web page they are on.

Once again this article is not intended to be the end all and complete solution to optimizing a web page. This is the basic structure of a web site that all web designers should be aware of when designing a business website that needs to rank well in the organic search result.

Hope everyone has an amazing, blessed Mother’s Day enjoying the day and their families.

Blessings to all…

On  JUNE 1st, across the country from Alaska to Florida-New York to Hawaii,  U.P.S. will be delivering a very special box to all those who register before that date! (Those registering in June, will receive the same box upon registration) In that box,  will be all sorts of FUN TOOLS to help bring God’s Word Alive to YOUR family this summer.  Some of those things being a Bible Bee Branded Bible for each contestant,  memory cards preprinted, Inductive Sword Study,  and much much more!

Want to know more….check out the website:   www.biblebee.org and then look for a host near you!

Want Google TV? Your Wait May Soon Be Over

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Hey all,

Just rolled out a new site and blog design for the site. Hope you like it!

LBJ