Poland Stands Up To Bullies, Again

Poland is backing off from ratifying the crazy "anti-piracy" laws that are being foisted by capitalists on the free market.  The Poles stood up to the nazis, the soviets and now the fascist -capitalists.

Neil Young has figured it out, as have so many other artists, that IPR is pointless or worse.  Business is about winning market, not crushing competition.

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Roman History

For those who took Western Civ in high school, and learned about Rome, one wondered why the Roman legislature let one man become dictator, and bring on such evil.  How could this come to pass?  Great fear?  Personal danger?  Quite the contrary.  We can see how it can happen this very day.  When congress passed the NDAA, and gave the military the right to arrest and permanently detain congress without due process, they did so with eyes wide open.

Love of money is the root of all evil, and for those who lust for power, libido dominandi, their power is threatened.  The system that rewards them astonishingly well is falling apart.  They personally haven't the slightest idea of what to do about, or for that matter the inclination even if they did. There are a few Ron Pauls out there that care and understand, but they are too few too late.

Capitalism requires bailouts and war to keep going, just like socialism.  Both have to prove their ability to keep people in line and extract people's earnings to pay the elite's bills, or their credit dries up and the game is over.

Like everyone else, those congress people expect to be elsewhere when the arrests start, or if they start sooner than expected, feel they understand the game well enough that they themselves will not be arrested.  Or more to the point, whatever the risk, the alternative, being a nobody who works for a living, is a fate worse than death.  We all think we are personally exempt.  Maybe it is so in some cases, but I doubt any of us really are, one way or another.

This is why they dumbed down education in USA.  We've seen all of this before.  We know what is next.  Well, we do if we got an education.

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Your Private Jet

This Seattle start-up explains to the world how it will make money.  If you want to be in business you can never be afraid of the competition.  It is marketing, not control or secrecy that matters.  13,000 sign ups and growing.  They are addressing a pain many people feel, and that is the horror of being searched without probably cause, for no reason whatsoever, at airports.  With the added horror knowing, that if this was important, the airlines themselves would do it, and if it needed to be done, they would do it better and cheaper.  But the airlines have abandoned their customers.  This company will take the customers the airlines have abandoned.  Have the airlines abandoned you too?

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UN Seeks To Redefine Term "Wealth"

Hmmm... how about just go back to the original meaning, and that is weal, or the measure of how many people have access to what goods and services are available, something that only ever improves in a free market?

And requires respecting of property rights?

Well, that is not what they have in mind.  But they wouldn't, would they?

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How To Be #1 in Google Rankings

Don’t waste your money on search engine optimization.

Since I read Ogilvy on Advertising, I instantly spotted the scam of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  By paying lots of money, you can get ranked higher on google.  If true, so what?

Well, if true, you’ll get lots of sales.  Right?  Wrong!

Ogilvy pointed out that lots of exposure does not translate into sales.  He turned it around, and demanded - prove the ad gets you sales.  Since almost no one could do so, yet Ogilvy always did so, Ogilvy crushed his competition.  The TV series Mad Men is inspired by Ogilvy. (His book below.)

Let me say again what I’ve said many times, and I think is extremely important for all to realize: the web is about communicating, not about selling.  Never try to build a business on the web.  Always use the web to communicate your business.

Sure, being #1 does generate sales, but it is only worth it if getting to number one costs you nothing.  To pay for #1 position costs way more than any benefit from being in number one.  If you have a 10% net profit, and you pay $10,000 to get to number one, then number one has to generate $100,000 in sales, just to break even.  That is to say that $100,000 bump is pointless, and worse.  You need to buy the infrastructure to support the higher level of sales, so you invest to handle pointless business.  The losses mount.

And the number one in this case is like a heroin high, short lived, so you have to keep going from fix to fix trying to stay there.  Countless people have had their businesses crushed paying to get high on google rankings.  The  fact that there is so much SEO help on offer is a tribute to how much malinvestment in this field there is.

Google has a lot riding on being credible as to offering up #1.    To get to number one, and stay there, there are two critical elements, one everyone knows.  The one everyone knows is “how many people link to your site?”  The less one known is “how well is your site rated by others on third party rating services?”  There are many other factors in the rankings, but these two are critical and you are in control of both.  In short you need ranking AND reputation. No SEO people can help you with both.

Although there are about 20 academics worldwide, and a very popular accordionist in the UK named john spiers (there is even a wikipedia entry on him!), I come up #1 on a google search.  I neither buy ads nor employ SEO.  But being number one drives people to my site and sales.

You cannot buy the necessary combination of ranking and reputation, but you can build it.  How to do so?

There are three elements to position #1

1. Your website

2. Links to your website from 3rd parties.

3. Feedback on you at 3rd parties, such as yelp and angie’s list.

Your small business exists because you solve a problem no one else addresses. 

Here are two different solutions offered by entrepreneurs in the same area in the same industry, and an extremely tough industry at that.  Both rank very high in reputation and google.  I’ve met and conversed with both.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/18/EBGGQB9R9P1.DTL&ao=all

http://www.claremontrug.com/

Neither is what you would expect in that industry, both were badly needed.  Each is unique.  As Jerry Garcia said, it is not enough to be the best, you must be the only one.

So what to do?

First get your website in your name, and make something simple and direct.

People in the market go to the web to search, looking for rank and reputation.  What do you offer?  If you were trying to find your solution on the web, what search terms would you use?  Go to  google insights and put in a term, say start up business

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=start%20up%20business%2C&geo=US&cmpt=q

and see what you get.  If you look at that page, it alone has about an hours worth of linking and looking you can do.  Point is, you start to figure what terms you should include in the content of your website.  This helps more people see you.

Next, your website should be wired up for google analytics, so you can know who what where when as to visitors to your site.  

Yahoostores has an ecommerce engine as robust as anything amazon offers, for $50 per month.  It allows you to work the web with email marketing, couponing, etc. Credit card merchant account capability is ideal, so check with Costco on whether you qualify for this service.  If not, then you are limited to paypal, check or money order, and purchase order online sales. But this also allows sales 24/7 online.  The key benefit is yahoo supports affiliate programs, which is key in having people link to your site.

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/compare-plans?p=MONGO&s_affiliate=ms_acq_open_20090901%3fAID=10432576&PID=2131392&SID=10-compare

Figure out who has an interest in sending customers your way. We’ll call these affiliate people (AP).  With affiliate fee, you are able to have the yahoostore create a link from the AP to your website, which tracks all traffic from your AP to your website.  You offer the AP 10% on all sales driven from their website to You. Yahoo tracks and reports to you (or both you and the AP) exactly what the traffic is, sales or no sales. In effect, the AP gets a commission on sales in which they were probably unaware, and in any event completely mediated by the web. Extra money for no effort, plus info on with whom they should follow up.

To qualify, qualified AP must put a link (generated by yahoo) from their website to You.

It is unlikely this will result in much of the way of sales.  But the two benefits to You are 1.  links from third parties to You causes You to rise in the search engine results (at some point to number one) and 2.  quarterly reports to the AP are an opportunity to remind the designers that you appreciate their business.  The yahoo reports that show traffic from their site to you are interesting to the AP, and you can add your own pitch on those occasions.

The link on the AP site may be a logo with something to the effect of  “You, our preferred  source”.

Next, feedback ratings are critical, and no ratings are dangerous.Happy people skip away delighted and unhappy people write bad reviews online.  You can have 1000 happy customers and one bad review online.

My book on Amazon has over 45 customer reviews.  40 are 5 star, and 4 are one star.  People throw out the high and low and then figure what is left (throw out 4 one star and four of the 5 star, and you net about 35 five star.) Time and again I hear people say they bought the book because of the ratings.

 How did i get so many 5 star ratings?  Every time someone emails me with a compliment on the book, I say “make us both famous by writing a review on amazon.”  If I did not do this, my book would have 4 one star ratings on amazon.com, and the sales would be dead.

Learn what rating services people trading in your industry rely upon.  (In my experience BBB and JD Powers are ratings people buy, not earn, so be careful as to which services matter.) 

Therefore, top to bottom, any time anyone compliments anything you, they should be met with  “If you like us, rate us on yelp.” (or angie’s list or favorite ratings service). Yahoo stores automatically solicits customer feedback on all transactions. The more sources and the more feedback the better, but concentrated at yelp.

Caution:  people who look to such ratings also note the spacing of the ratings.  My 45 + ratings are evenly spaced over ten years.  If the ratings are ganged up in one time and place, it looks as though you stuffed the ballot box, and it loses credibility.  So this is an ongoing project.

Check out the ratings on your competitors:

http://www.yelp.com/

Note how few ratings it takes to move up

Note leveraging at yelp, you’ll see where previous viewers went next. 

And note who advertises where you search on Yelp.

Going back to google insights, 

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=start%20up%20business%2C&geo=US&cmpt=q

note google projects that 4th quarter 2012 interest will be about 60% of 1st quarter 2004 interest.

How does that track with business plan projections?

Another source of links would be youtube, where You would establish a channel and offer say a half dozen 60 second youtubes on topics that address the common concerns of your customers, or whatever the top six search questions are.  These videos can be very home made, but the audio has to be first rate.  These help by creating not only links to you, but well travelled links, a benefit.

Another technique is to encourage people to facebook and blog their experiences with you, say after some encounter or such, with a link.  Let them crowd their social media with a pix of you in action. Over time these one time links add up.

Taking first place in competition is a matter of being marginally better. To get ranked higher in each category you need only a few more links than the other.  And only a few more higher ratings than the other. 

These steps should lead to You becoming the #1 ranked on google, with high ratings and breadth and depth of exposure on the web and a bulletproof reputation. You can even take a bad review once in a while.  With this fundamental tactic, any subsequent tactics to increase sales will have the critical step, “sell the company” already in place.

I write black and white to be clear and in hopes of smoking out someone one who in fact is expert at legitimate SEO, knows Ogilvy, and produces results.  By the magic of the web I may someday get an email from such a person, at which time I will gladly recommend him.  But when I went looking, no such person.  In 10 years of challenging SEO people to prove their work, no such luck.  So I did it myself, for free. And also learned you must have the combination of ranking and reputation online to be worthwhile.  The reputation part takes time, comes from working, and cannot be bought. 

I would prefer to pay for this service, since I do not want to do this work (I have better things for me to do) but sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself.  I look forward to hearing from someone who can cost effectively help others leverage the web for business promotion.

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CJ Checks In From the NY Toy Show

I went to my first trade show this weekend, the NY International Gift Fair.  It was a very good experience.  Previous to attending I had made phone contact with a highly recommended rep who agreed to show my line - if I could demonstrate that the local stores were giving me orders (not a problem).  At the fair I spent a good while searching-out all the toy and puzzle companies I could, noticing how they set-up their booths, their volume of customers, trying to eavesdrop on sales/negotiations, etc. when all of a sudden someone called my name.  It turns-out my rep, who I'd never met before, had read my name from my badge and wanted to talk!  That alone was worth the trip.  i'm planning to see her again at the Toy Fair in NYC in Feb.  I promised to bring my samples to show her.  She's only seen photos so far.

It was also great to get a feel for the culture of the fair/industry.  I liked it.   It couldn't be more different from what I'm used to, which is lots of geeky guys talking shop.  An interesting example was when I went to thank a seminar speaker who was nervous that she had been boring people.  I assured her that if people weren't interested, they'd just leave.  She looked horrified, as if I'd just suggested making puppy soup, and told me that "...people are much too polite to do that...."  Well, not where I'm from.  Of course first they usually pause long enough to first tell you that you're an idiot...

There were lots of examples of the importance of design.  One of the first booths I went to overwhelmed me with the quality of their products and I couldn't stop complimenting them on their designs.  Then I learned that they were the Philadelphia Museum of Art and felt like an idiot.  On the other extreme were several factory and craft booths showing nice, but undifferentiated goods like thermoses or wooden chess sets.

Overall I'd say the biggest plus was feeling like I'm beginning to be part of a different world and like this is possible.  It's a pretty heady feeling.  Thanks for helping me get on this road.

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Taxes Up 30% On You

They won't be done until they are 90%...  as long as the US Govt and the powers that be show that the USA citizens can be mulct out of everything they have, they dollar will remain attractive.  Resistance will be crushed.  You can run, but you cannot hide.  The only safe place is self-employment.

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Etiology, Adaptation, & Progress of an Innovation

Innovation keeps business healthy by matching people’s needs as they change, promoting natural selection through adaptation..  In agriculture, redesigning fruit and vegetables is a biological imperative, because nature abhors consistency and adores adaptation.

Now once upon a time the socialists who run Amerika had reduced our food supply to the limits of bread being Wonder and Cheese being Velveeta.  Wine was Lancers.  That is it, folks, nothing to see, keep moving.

It got to the point that 40% of the produce department sales were in potatoes and apples, and the two kinds of apple were red delicious and golden delicious. Nature abhors stasis so much that ever-renewed varieties end up tasting like sawdust, and important benefits, like micro-doses of cyanide you get from eating the seeds are rendered empty too.

It is impossible to take the seed out of an apple and plant it and get the same fruit off the new tree.  Of the six seeds in the apple, each seed would give you a different apple tree, again, none of which would be the original whence the seed came.  Whatever fruit you might get, it is also likely to be inedible. 

Among apples, occasionally a tree would produce a fruit that is edible.  In that case, the only way to gt more of the same is to graft a branch of that tree onto another apple root stalk.  All apples in the store came from a tree made by grafting edible fruit branches on other stock. Man has done this for millennia. 

A few hundred years ago Gregor Mendel figured out how to hybridize, so we take white peas and red peas and get pink peas.  Or take attributes of apples and turn them into specialized apples.  Big breakthrough, that.

That Gregor Mendel revolutionized food production by studying the science of inheritability, adaptation and hybridization is largely unknown.  Working at the same time, Darwin developed a balderdash hypothesis of evolution and is world famous.  This is another example of where good ideas fail to gain prominence and bad ideas get adapted by the powers that be to serve the powers that be.

Anyway, nature so abhors consistency that when entire orchards of one kind of apple tree, say Braeburn, are growing to fruition, a few trees will go “sport.”  And that is an apple no one ever saw before will grow on that tree, completely contrary to all efforts at uniformity.  If that sport is attractive, then that too will be grafted and we have a new fruit.

Now, such natural progression cannot be patented, so those who hate mankind look to intellectual property rights as a way to patent a kind of fruit so not only can no one else sell it, you cannot even grow one.  Wicked.

Nature screams “have variety!” and BigAg/BigGovt will get violent if you trade raw milk or offer other than velveeta, or grow your own to share, or use a "patented" ag item.  Raw cheese an milk variesmany ways each batch, all for the good.  Govt says you must drink pasteurized (dead), homogenized (same) milk.  Very wicked.

Populations are easier to dominate if they have less food to eat and less choice.  Standing in line becomes a purpose in life.  So it was not accidental that 40% of produce sales were potato and apples, one kind.  Small biz innovators brought us variety and better quality and nutrition.  In the 1950s there were "Cheese conspiracies" where small groups would import god cheese and split it up in someone's home.  Some of these efforts grew into food chains.

But the varieties caused a problem inasmuch as the cashier/checkers could not tell one apple or potato from another, so for expediency would just ring them up as the cheapest.  Stores lost money selling better fruit and veggies.

How to solve this problem?  With something called PLU codes. They name all fruits and veggies so when a clerk enters the code the computer knows the item and gives the price.  Just print codes on labels and apply them to the fruit and veggies.

You can download the code book here.

So, put the codes on paper labels on the fruit, at random, say every three or 4 pieces, and they are marked enough for the store to find the plu when checking you out.  Hard to do by hand, so applicator guns were invented.

Hand applying labels became way too time consuming. And it was a competitive advantage for the packers to sell the fruit pre-labelled.  So machines to apply them were invented. Early machines crushed fruit, so later machines were developed to be gentler.

The PLU codes ended up getting eaten, to the chagrin of moms, so the code label stock was redesigned to be of soy “paper and ink.”  Now edible.

Next the labels were doggone sticky, and hard to pull off if that is what you wanted.  So the labels were changed from round to pear shaped.  The round part had glue and he little part had no glue.  Therefore you could easily lift the little part to pull off the whole label.

OK... but the OCD market in USA is huge, so, I am not making this up, there are labels that dissolve into soap when you wash the fruit.  The ways you can make a buck in USA!

But wait, all that paper is ugly and kind of a waste, so how about skipping the paper and just printing on the fruit itself?

And then there are people who seek out organic, and spurn frankenfoods, so what to do for them? Include the info in the code itself.

Now, because there are small business entrepreneurs, the innovators,we have much wider variety.  in time the conservators will adapt the innovations, apply their economies of scale, and the result will be more better cheaper faster to teh poit the poorest person will have the benefit of our innovation.

Innovate, on, Garth.

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Labels You Can Use To Kill

Out of Fashion, from oldest to most recent:

Christian

Heretic

Witch

Jew

Communist

In Fashion:

Terrorist

USA has decided it can murder on its own say so.  No rule of law. No one is objecting.

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Blame Obama, Hillary vs. Mitt, violence

In the last year, as a google search term, Blame Obama went from 25 million hits to 250 million hits. But Blame Bush is way up to, now 43 million hits, from 10% to 20% as many as Obama.  He is catching up!  But he was in office twice as long, not to mention his dad, another Bush, was in for 4 years.  Blame Clinton brings up as many as Bush, but there are two Clintons to blame.

All this is to run Obama out, so Hillary can be president.  Mitt will become the Republican candidate because polls will show he can beat Obama.  But when it gets down to it, elections will show he cannot be Hillary.  Mitt is a socialist, and socialists do not like him, conservatives do not like him, so hillary will win.

In the meantime, calls for violence continue to be made.  Just remember, if they call for violence, they work for the powers that be.  Sure, protest and get tazed, peppered or even a nightstick shampoo, but never strike first or strike back.  (And even the most superficial head wounds bleed like crazy, so they make great photo-ops).

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When Communists Confab

When the Chinese Communist party meets, the reports before during and after are circumspect.  the October 2011 meet was significant for it was the last before the change of leadership.  Whole lotta jockeying for position.

But I was told sometign I think is more interesting about the meeeting, or a point that in fact has been reported, but may be more significant than noted.  The BBC says:

He said the economic achievements of the last 30 years could be lost without "institutional" changes.

My correspondent notes that the chaos that foreigners experience and complain of in regards to trading with China, too flexible rules, whimsical contract adherence, disorderly market may be indeed painful to the 2 or 3 % of say the US market that is engaged with China, but those same problems aggravate the 100% of the Chinese in China who must endure the same problems.

He noted a fact that is well known, but significant in relation to the above meeting:  in spite of having on quarter of the worlds population, there is not a single worldwide Chinese brand name.  Not one. And within China, there is not a single brand trusted in China.

Even Apple Computer had its entire stores copied, with employees hired, ones who believed they were working for Steve Jobs.  This is chaos.

How this came to be, what the Communist Party plans to do about it, what is likely to happen, and what it means to those who trade with China (and to those who don't),  I'll be reporting on over the next few days.

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