This parable comes from another great book, “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, by Robert Kiyosaki. I just had to hop online and find the parable so I could re-read it and as I was reading it I thought it could bring a little mid week inspiration to some of you!

I hope you enjoy it!

“Once upon a time there was this quaint little village. It was a great place to live except for one problem. The village had no water unless it rained.

To solve this problem once and for all, the village elders decided to put out to bid the contract to have water delivered to the village on a daily basis.

Two people volunteered to take on the task and the elders awarded the contract to both of them. They felt that a little competition would keep prices low and ensure a backup supply of water.

Self-employed thinking
The first of the two people, Ed, immediately ran out, bought two galvanized steel buckets and began running back and forth along the trail to the lake which was a mile away.

He immediately began making money as he labored morning to dusk hauling water from the lake with his two buckets. He would empty them into the large concrete holding tank the village had built.

Each morning he had to get up before the rest of the village awoke to make sure there was enough water for the village when it wanted it. It was hard work, but he was very happy to be making money and for having one of the two exclusive contracts for this business.

Business owner thinking
The second winning contractor, Bill, disappeared for a while. He was not seen for months, which made Ed very happy since he had no competition. Ed was making all the money.

Instead of buying two buckets to compete with Ed, Bill had written a business plan, created a corporation, found four investors, employed a president to do the work, and returned six months later with a construction crew.

Within a year his team had built a large volume stainless steel pipeline, which connected the village to the lake.

At the grand opening celebration, Bill announced that his water was cleaner than Ed’s water. Bill knew that there had been complaints about dirt in Ed’s water.

Bill also announced that he could supply the village with water 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ed could only deliver water on the weekdays. He did not work on weekends.

Then Bill announced that he would charge 75% less than Ed did for this higher quality and more reliable source of water. The village cheered and ran immediately for the faucet at the end of Bill’s pipeline.

In order to compete, Ed immediately lowered his rates by 75%, bought two more buckets, added covers to his buckets, and began hauling four buckets each trip. In order to provide better service, he hired his two sons to give him a hand for the night shift and on weekends.

When his boys went off to college, he said to them, “Hurry back because someday this business will belong to you.” For some reason, after college, his two sons never returned. Eventually Ed had employees and union problems. The union was demanding higher wages, better benefits, and wanted its members to only haul one bucket at a time.

Work smarter, not harder
Bill, on the other hand, realized that if this village needed water, then other villages must need water too. He rewrote his business plan and went off to sell his high speed, high volume, and low cost, clean water delivery system to villages throughout the world.

He only makes a penny per bucket of water delivered, but he delivers billions of buckets of water, and all that money pours into his bank account. Bill had developed a pipeline to deliver money to himself as well as water to the villages.

Bill lived happily ever after, and Ed worked hard for the rest of his life and had financial problems forever after. The end.

That story about Bill and Ed has guided me for years. It has assisted me in my life’s decision-making process. I often ask myself, “Am I building a pipeline or hauling buckets?” Am I working hard or am I working smart?”

And the answers to those questions have made me financially free.”

Many of you who visit my blog are just starting in the online world or perhaps some of you have been in this world for a few years already but have slowly fell back in the rut. We are not working on the internet to replace our day jobs with online jobs. We should be focusing on working smarter and building a business that will allow for financial and life freedom!

Below are links to the two books I mentioned. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a great “Food For Thought” book based upon Real Estate, however it was the book that pushed me to first quite my day job six years ago and I still recommend it. Both books link to amazon NOT through an affiliate link. I don’t recommend them because I want money but because they are good! :)

Have a great week! :)

Michael R Roberts

I decided to do a test of a few different document sharing sites and compare them to see which really is the best. With SEO it’s all about optimizing our time and getting the most bang for out of our effort. So let’s look at the results!

The four sites I used for this test are:
Issuu, Scribd, Docstoc and Doxtop.

For this test I used the exact same article on all four sites and published all articles at the same time with the help of my SEO team.
We used an article with obscure and low competition keywords so that we could see the results more clearly.

INDEXING
The first test preformed was indexing times of each of these sites. For this test we simply published our content on the site and let it sit. We didn’t do any Social Bookmarking, Pinging or any other tactics that might alter results. Results may vary.

1. Doxtop – (Indexed in 16 hours of publishing)
2. Scribd – (Indexed in 23 hours of publishing)
3. Docstoc – (Indexed in 3 days of publishing)
4. Issuu – (Indexed in 6 days of publishing)

Doxtop and Scribd are very quick to get indexed but the other two sites take quite some time. In a case like this I would add these two sites into a software like Traffic-Bug to increase the indexing time.

RANKING FOR KEYWORD (TITLE)
The second test was preformed after all sites had been indexed. We also verified that all articles were on a level playing field and no one article had comments, traffic or backlinks. Since all four articles had the exact same title it would be easy to do an exact phrase match search and then log which sites ranked best.

1. Scribd
2. Docstoc
3. Doxtop
4. Issuu (ranked two pages lower than Scribd)

Scribd was the clear winner but Docstoc and Doxtop weren’t far behind. Issuu in this test scored miserably.

RANKING FOR TEXT IN BODY(GOOGLE)
Next I wanted to see which sites preformed best for the actual body text. Title’s are nice but often times we are unable to squeeze our keywords into the title of an article. So it’s very important to test how the body text is ranked. For this we used an exact phrase match for a phrase in the body of each article and compared which articles ranked best. I wanted to take this test one step further and so I divided Google and Yahoo into two separate tests.

1. Scribd
2. Docstoc
3. Doxtop
4. Issuu

RANKING FOR TEXT IN BODY (YAHOO)

1. Docstoc
2. Scribd
3. Doxtop
4. Issuu

Docstoc had a clear advantage over Scribd in this test on Yahoo. In Google both services were fairly close. In both tests Scribd and Docstoc were clear winners over the other two services.

PAGE RANK OF SITE
For the most of us we aren’t actually using these sites to necessarily target rankings. It is nice to dominate the entire first page on Google, but the reality is we may have dozens of these articles all pointing back to our main page. So it’s important to measure how much weight each site carries. So I did a quick measure to see how the sites rank in Page Rank. *Note. Just because a site’s homepage is a certain PR does not mean your article is that PR. This test is more of a measure of the strength of the overall site in general and the link juice it can pass.*

1. Scribd – PR8
1. Issuu – PR8
2. Docstoc – PR6
3. Doxtop – PR4

EASE OF USE
Sometimes it’s all about speed and ease of use. If a backlink is only 10% more effective but it takes 3x longer to achieve it often times is not worth the extra effort. So for this test I wanted to quickly compare which sites were easiest to use. The trick to this test was to get an objective opinion. Since I used three of these sites regularly and have my favorite and hadn’t ever used Docstoc before I didn’t want to be the judge on this test. So I brought in my wife who hadn’t ever used any of these sites. I had her go through the whole process of creating an account and publishing her first article on all three sites. Then I had her give her opinion on which site were easiest to use and her preference.

1. Scribd
2. Docstoc
3. Doxtop
4. Issuu

SPECIAL FEATURES, LIMITATIONS, FUNCTIONALITY

1. Issuu
++Link for every document in doc description (DO FOLLOW)
++Link on profile page (DO FOLLOW)
+Facebook connect appears to have been added. This was added recently after my test and I have not verified.

2. Doxtop
+Link on profile page (NO FOLLOW)
+Facebook connect or login with Open ID (registration is much easier this way)

3. Scribd
+Link on profile page (NO FOLLOW)
+Facebook connect

4. Docstoc
+Link on profile page (NO FOLLOW)
+Facebook connect

THE RESULTS
*Drum roll please*

1. Scribd.com -25 points
2. Docstoc.com -20 points
3. Doxtop.com -17 points
4. Issuu.com -15points

And there you have it! Now you know which sites are ranked best and are worth your time. Though Issuu ranked in quite lower and I don’t use it as often I still find it a great resource! It is the only site on this list that offers a complete (DO FOLLOW) backlink that will show up on Google! A great tactic can be to publish several Issuu documents with backlinks to your main site. Then to give Issuu the boost it badly needs, simply input that URL into Traffic-Bug. This way you will look at much faster index times and are easily able to see backlinks being built to your main site.

If you have any suggestions on other article sites you would like to see tested just let us know in the comments section below.
or
If you have a different type of test you would like to see let us know! We are open to share our results on any subject!

**If you liked this article then let us know by clicking the facebook like button or sharing on twitter!

Just testing some various SEO techniques.  Will post my results.

;P

Michael Roberts

Sure we all might not have the SEO know how as someone like Matt Cutts but did you know you can start making a nice income right now with what you do know?

I am sure you are all aware on how Google and other Search Engines have been shifting their focus to “Local” results. But, us as internet marketers, don’t have a local business…so how can we use this to our advantage? Well local businesses are clueless when it comes to optimization, getting content indexed, installing a blog, etc.

When I was 19-21 I owned a janitorial company that had 13 employee’s working for me full time. We had several company vehicles, equipment, etc. Sounds like a decent size company right? Surely bigger than your standard chiropractic office or small restaurant. However, even with my resources and company size I was still clueless about how to even begin to build my business online. I was strapped for time working in my business, didn’t have time to learn to do this stuff myself and there were so many “So Called” SEO companies out there who wouldn’t work with me…All they wanted to do was pressure me into signing a contract for thousands of dollars.
I would have killed to have someone cut through all that tape and help me build my business online!

You think my scenario was unique? Of course NOT! In 2008 there were over 29million small business in the USA alone. Talk about a big market! I will take a bet that all of you who are reading my blog have never targeted a keyword that big.

So there is a huge market for local businesses needing SEO and Web services and now that Google is moving things locally…it’s like Google is literally putting a golden nugget right on our lap. All we have to do is take action!

Some of you reading this still may be skeptical or hesitant. I can already here a few of you saying, “Michael that’s great and all but I just don’t know enough to take action. I am no where near Matt Cutts. How can I do this?” The truth is..sure there are people out there who know more than you about SEO and there are also tons of people out there who know more than me. But that is irrelevant. The services these small local business need don’t require some huge GURU’s knowledge. Think of it this way….These local businesses don’t want to hire Leonardo De Vince to paint a wall red! That’s overkill and ridiculous. But if these business approached someone like Leonardo De Vince to paint their wall red….all the artist would do is talk to them about how he could make this wall a piece of art. Something magnificent, something that would be remembered forever…..which all sounds good…but that artist would also be asking a fee that is likely more than the business is worth, let alone Leonardo De Vince would be using terms and techniques that would just confuse and frustrate the business owner.

I hope you are understanding the power and opportunity that is now sitting in front of us! However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There still are several hurdles you will need to overcome. I developed some techniques nearly a year ago to refine this process for myself, but then when I met Caro she showed me that she had so refined this process it works like a highly oiled machine!

Caro and her business partner are both very successful in the online marketing world. When they got together they teamed up to build OHM (Offline Hero’s Method) to make this process highly refined. I was blown away by how much attention to detail and how much hard work they have done.

I find So Called GURU’s all over the internet who try to sell stuff that they actually have no knowledge about. It’s very frustrating to know who to trust. With Caro, she already has a successful consulting business and she is already making this work! So you may ask then why is she willing to sell this secret? (Remember that number I told you about earlier? 29+million businesses in the USA alone a few years back. Who could possibly corner the entire world market of local businesses? It would be silly for her not to share and sell her techniques.)

Their mission is to assist other Internet Marketers, who may not have yet made the money they want online, and are looking for new opportunities to build a credible, sustainable and profitable consulting business, as they have. They have created a Training Center which is jam packed full of information on how to:

Identify the ideal Local Business Client
How to Obtain The Local Business Client
How to Retain that Local Business Client

The biggest mistake Internet Marketers make when approaching Local Business Clients is that they list their Services and expect the Business Owner to be impressed. Feeling quite disappointed when they are not. OHM focuses on teaching it’s Offline Consultants about providing VALUE for their Client, which is a HUGE shift in focus to what most have thought was the way to approach a prospect. The key is to know how to pick what is valuable for a prospective client, and how to get their attention so that they will listen to what you can do for them. All of which can be found in OHM’s Training center

There’s no magic pill. It is about taking action. And it’s about knowing the, Right‚ way to do it. All of the materials offered in OHM are exactly what Caro and her business partner use for their Offline Consulting businesses. So there is no need to guess what works. Or go through the painful trial and error process. It’s proven as they’re doing it!

Consulting to Offline Clients is a real opportunity. Yes it is, the next big thing,- and it is still at it’s early stages, which means there is plenty of Local Business Clients needing online marketing assistance. All you need to know is how to approach and win them!

Michael Roberts

Now this is no ordinary sign holder! The story could have easily ended here as we have all seen sign holders on a common occurrence. In fact we see them so often that we almost train our eye’s to ignore them. Yet this sign holder was more extraordinary. The woman has shorter blond hair and is well advanced in her years. She holds a big guitar shaped sign with an even bigger smile on her face. Atop that fluffy blond hair is a set of big headphones, a pair you might see right out of the 90′s, and a long cord plugging into what looks to be an old cassette or CD player.

I can only guess as to what she is listening to, perhaps some Pink Floyd or Jimmy Hendrix, but one thing is for certain…it makes her wanna boogie! She is rockin out with that sign like she is performing on stage. Her dance moves rival that of moves seen in Flash Dance. Watching her for those brief minutes put a smile on both my wife’s and my face.

From time to time when we arrive at the “punishment light” now we look for her. In fact we no longer dread this busy road but look forward to seeing if she will be dancing. Honking as we go by her and seeing her wave back.

A month later my wife was curious about her and actually found that she had her OWN Facebook fan page! I was astonished and to make my surprise even bigger she had over 1,700 Facebook likes! 1,700!? Now my town of Bend’s total population is roughly 70,000 people. So in a few short months she was able to generate 2.5% of the entire city to follow her on Facebook. (Talk about power)

Her Facebook page is quite active as she has taken a cold business front and has made people become friends with her. People stop to get pictures with her so they can upload it to her profile, people have made CD’s for her and my favorite quote on the page is, “My husband and I just tried Little Caesars for the first time because of YOU!”

So if you have ever been skeptical if connecting with your customers on a more personal level can really help your local business please take a lesson in life from the Bend sign lady. She has made 2.5% of the city fall in love with not just her but with the company she promotes.

If you already have a website then I encourage you to immediatley figure out how to connect it to your Facebook profile or Fan Page!
If this sounds hard don’t fear….I have shot a Youtube Video for you on How to Integrate Facebook’s Features into your website.

Keep on rockin on sign lady….keep on rockin on!
Her facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/BendLittleCaesarsLady

I want to send a warm thank you out to Caro McCourtie from OHM and 30dc.
I also want to send a thank you to her partner who helped set up the camera equipment and helped produce the OHM method.

If you want to learn more about the Offline Hero’s Method please go check it out here:
OFFLINE HERO’S METHOD

The OHM course teaches you how to attract business clients and teaches you how to help them build an online presence. I used many of the same tactics taught int he OHM course and I was easily able to bring in a very nice income. I think Caro and her partner really hit this course on the head when they laid it all out!

Some of my favorite quotes from Caro’s speech was:

“If you have any level of IM experience currently, you ALREADY know more than they do!

Remember to ask the client questions, not make statements, as the power is with the person who asks the questions (as you become the informed one).

You are NOT selling services; you are providing VALUE, this is a HUGE shift in thinking and how you approach your prospective Client – it’s about helping them get more customers, not demonstrating all you can do for them. ”

Here are some very solid tips everyone who owns a local business should be utilizing.

1) Register your business in Google Places.
a) When you register your business in Google Places be sure to fill out your profile as throughly as possible. Connect as many pictures as possible, video, etc. Also be sure to use your keywords in descriptions and for the IMG ALT tags on the photos.
b) Get as many reviews to your Google Places listing as possible. Offer new customers a discount in exchange for a review or contact some old clients that you have a good relationship with and ask for a review.

The more complete your profile is and the more positive reviews you have the better your listing will preform.

2) Build local back links!
a) Goto Google and type in (Your State) (your niche) blogs. Then start doing blog commenting on all the blogs in your niche for the state. After you do many of these narrow your search even down to seeking blogs in your city or adjacent cities.
b) Start finding all the directory type sites in your niche and create profiles and drive a few reviews. (A good example would be to get a profile up on Yelp if you are a restaurant.)

3) Try migrating your website to a server that is closer.
a) I talked about this in one of my news videos. In our testing we saw a small difference on rankings depending on where your server is located. Chances are your server is States away or possibly even in a different country. Locate where your server is actually at and move your website to a more local server.

4) Put these three steps above into action.
a) From my experience, finding good information to learn is not the problem. I could go on listing more tips, but the problem I see is people don’t put what they learned into action! I want you to take these three steps and really work hard on these. Build local back links and fill out a Google Places account. Even if you already have a Google Places account I want you to go in and review it. Can you add more pictures? Can you drive more reviews?

5) For USA readers…try filling out an Angie’s List profile.

Check out Caro’s own video now!

CARO’S  VIDEO

Michael R Roberts

The Caro interview I did will be up by Monday and I appreciate your patience on that, but for this post I wanted to cover everything interesting in the conference that was taught.

When you goto one of these…people start throwing website names out there…..
names you have never heard of. So you write the name down to research it later. Well at this conference so many dang cool things
were said… that before I knew it I had a full sheet of paper filled up with cool sites and ideas.

So without further ado…..here are some of the coolest sites and things talked about.

1. Start migrating Flash off your websites. iPads can’t support flash, neither can a lot of smart phones. There are already 17 million devices out there that can’t view flash. This number is only going to grow. So contact your graphics guy and start coming up with new solutions to replace the Flash on your website. (If you are clever or have a clever web guy….then you can actually insert a piece of code that detects when a mobile type device visits your site and displays something other than the flash.)

As Ed Dale says, “I hate Flash more than I hate the….” well I won’t finish that one. Fill in the answer in the comments section below if you were there! ;)

2. Wonder how much content your viewers can see on their monitor? Well Google has solved that problem. Check out this fancy Google Labs tool that will help you see how to improve your opt in pages or sales pages. Keeping content so 90% of browsers can see it is a good thing!

3. Voice Follow Up . Hmmm not sure what to say about this one other than it’s PURE AWESOMENESS. It allows you to have people opt in via the phone. You can literally broadcast your number and people can text that number with there email and name and they will immediatly join your auto responder sequence. This will be a killer for anyone doing radio ad’s. I will be adding this to my business cards when I goto events. I don’t want people actually calling my cell phone or home phone. Why not give them a numeber they can call where they reach a cool recording of whatever you like….with the option of learning more about your products or opting into a email sequence.

4. If your an iPad user then there is a very cool app you should pickup. Evernote. It can sync with your mac and you can simply write notes, keep track of ideas, etc. It’s an iPad Must Have.

5. The rules of a blog. During the conference they touched on a very good point. The three fundamental rules every blog should meet.

a) Simplicity – One Page = One Job – Look at the iPhone and iPad apps. They are so successful because they can do one thing very well.

b) Speed – Google is factoring page load speed into rankings and it has been proven over and over again if your page loads slow you loose customers. If you haven’t watched my video talking about ways to speed up your site go look at it now! Page Load Speed Video

c) Beautiful – No more producing shoddy quality! Spend a few bucks and get a graphics guy to design you some quality content. Take a look at my new video intro’s for example. (Yeah yeah I know this website still is very ugly but it’s in the process.)
***
To find cheap quality graphics people goto:
freelancer.com or fiverr.com

6. Tips for writing a sales page by the master John Carlton. Your sales page should fill in these three blanks.

We help (this group of people)
….do (this benefit)
…even if (worst case believable scenario)

Example:

We help aspiring artists
sell their art for millions of dollars
even if they have no agent and have never sold a painting before!

Simple yet effective!

7. Mashable. Most of you probably know about this one but I had to put it down for those of you who haven’t. Probably the easiest way to stay up to date on Social Media and Tech.

More tips are on their way as well as the video from the conference.

Michael R Roberts