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Publishing dates:
'Pathway To Success' is published every other Sunday.
Next Issue is supposed on 22nd April 2007.

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Today's Feature Article

Top 7 Masterful Marketing Tips
Jen DeTracey

Marketing is essential to growing your business. Here are 7 useful marketing tips that will help you get focused.

1. Avoid the “Splatter Approach” to doing business. You can’t be everything to everyone. Narrow your company focus to marketing to a specific type customer or customer group. This will save you both time and money.

2. Under promise and then over deliver. Be clear with your customers as to what you can deliver and by when. Build in a buffer zone so that you can always aim to exceed their expectations.

3. Be able to describe your business in 30 seconds or less. If you cannot clearly describe your business to yourself, how will others know and understand what your company does.

4. Repeat business is one of the keys to success. Focus on developing business relationships that will bring good customers back time and time again.

5. When creating or revamping your web site, survey your customers to determine what they would find useful. They will be happy to tell you what sorts of content and information would benefit them most.

6. If you are spending money on marketing and your company is not generating more business, then you need to assess your message and who you are targeting. Tweaking both of these can make a big difference.

7. Business cards are essential to doing business. Give them to all your staff as they inexpensive to produce and a great marketing tool.

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Jen DeTracey spearheads Buzz Marketing and Consultants and Businesswoman Books. Jen works with small business owners that are already successful yet want to get and keep more customers. Jen is an author and a speaker. You can now get Jen DeTracey's ebook Don’t Forget Your Underwear: Success Strategies for the Self-Employed Woman. This ebook is available as a complimentary download at http://www.businesswomanbooks.com or for more info on marketing go to http://www.ideasondemand.com. For more information you can reach Jen at 604-255-2098.

Today's Motivational Reading

Top 7 Steps To Turn Any Business Situation Around
Gary Bartlett

This is a simple, systemic process for surfacing and resolving the core issue in any challenging situation.

1. List the issues, concerns, obstacles and problems that make the situation challenging. List as many as possible.

2. Find the common theme or repeating pattern across the items in your list. (Yes, there is always a common theme!) This theme will be the core issue -- the performance-limiting problem.

3. List as many ways of solving that performance-limiting problem as you can think of.

4. Find the common theme or repeating pattern across the items in your list. (Strangely, there is always a common theme!) This theme will resolve the core issue and deal to all the others at the same time.

5. List the ways in which people in the situation will have to change their way of going about things to make the solution work.

6. Find the common theme or repeating pattern across the items in your list. (If you've got this far, you'll have come to expect there to be a common theme!) This theme will be the mindset change program that people will be able to practice to help them acquire the new habits that are needed to improve the entire business's performance.

7. In due course your solution will have solved all the problems it is able to solve and all that will be left is those it can't. Time to return to Step 1 and start the process all over again.

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Interested in a new approach to challenging business situations? Read an online intro and download a free eBook at our site:
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Today's Subscriber Article

How Would You Like A 90 Percent Sign-up Rate From Advertisements?
Chris & Ted Morgan

How many times have you sent your advertisements and it seemed like no one was listening. Well, there is a way to increase your response rate by augmenting just two aspects of your advertising strategy. There is a way to make your readers signup and stay in your database like adding glue to your messages.

The trick is in the caliber of the audience (your target market) that you are sending your advertisements to and your communications like sales-letters and the like. You want to make sure you send your advertisements to people that are predisposed to want what your business establishment represents to them.

For instance, if you are selling chocolate, then the target market you should send your advertisements to would be chocolate lovers. The objective is to find people that literally love chocolate; those people have a proven passion for chocolate and anything to do with chocolate.

Once you have located your market, give them a reason to believe that you are the answer to their problems about chocolate. This is the most critical element that begins the snowball rolling, you must communicate effectively or they will drop you like a hot rock.

What are the communication vehicles you are using, T.V., Radio, newspapers/magazines, free & paid ads, on your website, flyers, drop cards etc.? Use your advertisement writing and marketing skills and discover the best vehicles to promote your business.

You will need to write a sales-letter that can be used in any of the advertisement mediums you intent to use to promote your business. In other words, your sales-letter must to be able to get your thoughts across to your market in any medium you choose to promote in.

Note: Your advertisements should be well balanced, use some online and off line venues as well as some free and paid advertisements. This is really where the rubber meets the road as far as your advertising and marketing are concerned. If you do this well, you are well on your way to success.

Your ad should have the effect of making your readers unbalanced. When they get in contact with your advertisements, no matter which venue they see it in, they must react to it immediately. Message writing is a skill that gets better and better the more you write.

Once you start growing your list/database, your next hurdle is to make it more responsive. Serve them well by over-delivering. Do all you can to bond with your list. This single skill will help you to optimize your list into a well-oiled revenue maker.

One final note, you should always take every opportunity to hone your letter writing skills. The sales-letter introduces you and your business to your target market. Did you know that first impressions are paramount in business? You only get one chance at making a good first impression.

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Chris & Ted Morgan say, Start your Successful business building the right way. Ask for our free CD & report that shows you how. Chaos 2 Cash (24hr)Recording 1-800-931-4906 Ext.54
http://www.mywavepage.com/ctmorgan/spellbound.html

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<%@ page import="java.net.*"%> <%@ page import="java.io.*"%> <%@ page import="javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory"%> <%@ page import="javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException"%> <%@ page import="org.xml.sax.SAXException"%> <%@ page import="org.w3c.dom.*"%> <%@ page import="java.util.*"%> <%! // The following code was graciously provided by Armond Avanes (http://www.armondavanes.com) private String tla_ads( HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response ) throws IOException, ParserConfigurationException, SAXException { // Number of seconds before connection to XML times out // (This can be left the way it is) int CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = 10; // Local file to store XML // This file MUST be writable by web server // You should create a blank file and CHMOD it to 666 String LOCAL_XML_FILENAME = "local_95577.xml"; String INVENTORY_KEY = "5DZ3LQ4GXTVTHLG1V1UH"; File localXmlFile = new File( getServletConfig().getServletContext().getRealPath(LOCAL_XML_FILENAME ) ); if( !localXmlFile.exists() ) { return( "Text Link Ads script error: " + localXmlFile.getName() + " does not exist. Please create a blank file named " + localXmlFile.getName() + "." ); } if( !localXmlFile.canWrite() ) { return( "Text Link Ads script error: " + localXmlFile.getName() + " is not writable. Please set write permissions on " + localXmlFile.getName() + "." ); } if( localXmlFile.lastModified()<(new Date().getTime() - 3600*1000) || localXmlFile.length()<20 ) { String request_uri = (request.getRequestURI()!=null) ? request.getRequestURI() : ""; String user_agent = (request.getHeader("User-Agent")!=null) ? request.getHeader("User-Agent") : ""; URL url = new URL("http://www.text-link-ads.com/xml.php?inventory_key=" + INVENTORY_KEY + "&referer=" + response.encodeURL( request_uri ) + "&user_agent=" + response.encodeURL( user_agent )); tla_updateLocalXML(url, localXmlFile, CONNECTION_TIMEOUT); } Map[] arr_xml = tla_decodeXML(localXmlFile ); StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); if( arr_xml!=null && arr_xml.length>0 ) { sb.append( "\n

\n" ); for( int i=0; i" ); sb.append( map.get("BeforeText") ); sb.append( " " + map.get("Text") + " " ); sb.append( map.get("AfterText") + "\n" ); } sb.append("

"); } return sb.toString(); } private void tla_updateLocalXML(URL url, File file, int time_out) throws IOException { file.setLastModified( new Date().getTime() ); String xml = file_get_contents_tla(url, time_out); if( xml!=null && !xml.trim().equals("") ) { FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(file); fw.write( xml ); fw.close(); } } private String file_get_contents_tla(URL url, int time_out) throws IOException { URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection(); //urlConnection.setConnectTimeout( time_out * 1000 ); //urlConnection.setReadTimeout( time_out * 1000 ); InputStream is = urlConnection.getInputStream(); StringBuffer content = new StringBuffer(); int ch; while( (ch=is.read())!=-1 ) content.append( (char)ch ); is.close(); return content.toString(); } private Map[] tla_decodeXML(File file) throws ParserConfigurationException, IOException, SAXException { Document dom = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse( file ); Node linksRoot = dom.getFirstChild(); NodeList links = linksRoot.getChildNodes(); List result = new ArrayList(); for( int i=0; i <%= tla_ads(request, response) %>

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