Something You May Not Know

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Red Tails Movie

Family and friends:

The Movie Red Tails that depicts the challenges and heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen
during WWII will be in movie theaters January 20th. This movie is produced
by George Lucas (Yes, the Star Wars and Indiana Jones George Lucas). George
Lucas was on the Tom Joyner Morning show today and he discussed
the challenges he had getting this movie into the theaters because he could not
find anyone in Hollywood that would invest the marketing dollars to get it in
theaters. The Hollywood investors said that they just didn’t know how well
an “all black action movie” would play to the movie going audience. As a result,
Lucas, Oprah and Tyler Perry put up the remaining $35 million to get the film to the
theaters. The total cost of the film is $100 million.

My challenge to all of us is to prove Hollywood wrong and let’s get the word
out to see a movie that shows the accurate history and determination of
“real” American Heroes. Now, we will spend the money to see fictitious characters
like Laura Craft, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Jason Bourne, James Bond
and the likes. Let’s go out and spend $300 million to see real American
Heroes depicted in the movies! Vote with your dollars!

Thanks for reading this and please pass it on!

” Hard work early in life pays large dividends down the road.”

Optimizing Your Blog

Five Effective SEO Strategies to Optimize Your Business Blog

BY AJ Kumar | Yesterday|

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So you’ve started a business blog, providing authoritative insights about the latest news and most pressing issues in your industry. With such great content, your blog should be raising your company’s profile and generating more customers. That is, of course, if anyone is actually reading it.

The trouble with blogging is that having great content isn’t always enough. You also have to keep search engine optimization in mind, and make your blog attractive to the biggest search engines to drive real traffic.

Here are five tips to help you optimize your business blog for search:

1. Conduct keyword research.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your business blog is to fail to include appropriate keywords in your posts. Every post is an opportunity to get noticed by search engines for a new set of keywords.

What makes a good keyword? Ideally, your blog posts should focus on long-tail keywords, such as “Sony Cybershot digital camera” or “Barack Obama action figure.” Good keywords should generate a small, but well-targeted amount of search traffic, including at least 500 exact match searches each month. They also shouldn’t be too common and too competitive with more popular blogs and websites.

Related: 10 Ways to Turn Your Blog into a Lead-Generation Machine

To determine whether a keyword has too much competition, first install a free browser toolbar — such as SEOBook’s SEO for Firefox plugin — that displays information about each site in the Google results pages whenever you search for your target keyword. Then take a look at the latest Google Top 10 results for your target word or phrase. If you see a lot of highly-ranked sites with many backlinks pointing to each page, your chosen keyword might be too competitive.

2. Build quality backlinks.
Backlinks play a crucial role in search by acting as “votes of confidence” for every page on your website. If you have plenty of high quality, relevant sites linking back to your page, it shows the search engines that your blog is also high quality.

To improve your rank in search engine results, consider making guest posts on relevant sites and participating in industry forums. This can result in links back to your site, which will ultimately boost your search rank.

3. Encourage social sharing.
Social signals, such as the number of times your content is shared on Facebook or the number of links back to your site from Twitter, play a role in how sites are prioritized in search engine results. That means social networking must figure into your blog strategy.

Related: A Six-Step Survival Guide for Search Engine Updates

For maximum impact, maintain an active presence on the social networking sites that are popular with your readers and provide tools on your site to help them share your content. For tips on how to write posts that get noticed and that people want to share, check out Copyblogger’s resources on headline formulas.

4. Improve your site structure.
The navigation structure of your business blog plays a critical role in how it is indexed and crawled by the search engines. So, it’s vital that you incorporate these best practices:

• Use a “shallow” navigation structure that enables every page to be reached within three clicks.

• Add internal links on every page, referring users to other parts of your site. This improves the user experience by helping expose readers to more content and increases the search engines’ ability to reach every page on your site.

• Remove duplicate content from your website. When pages on your site have the same content, there’s a risk that search engines will display only one page of such content in their results. To increase the number of pages that show up in the search results, rewrite any duplicate content to make the pages distinct from each other.

5. Think long term.
Following these tips for your business blog will take time. If you haven’t paid attention to search engine optimization until now, you aren’t going to revise all of your posts to target the best keywords, become a social media butterfly and restructure your website’s navigation structure in a single day.

But that’s okay. If you make ongoing optimization a long-term priority for your blog, you’ll soon see a payoff in the amount of free traffic coming from the search engines.

Feinstein to fight for BPA-free formula

Feinstein to fight for BPA-free formula
October 27, 2011

By Elaine Shannon, Environmental Working Group editor-in-chief

Five years ago, tens of millions of baby bottles and sippy cups sold in the United States were manufactured with a petrochemical derivative called bisphenol A.

Today, according to the American Chemistry Council, that number is – zero.

The reason: the market – millions of American parents – has overwhelmingly rejected food containers made with BPA, a plastic hardener that leaches out of the plastic. Environmental Working Group and other consumer and health advocates have helped marshal a consumer revolt against baby bottles and sippy cups made of polycarbonate plastic because a major component, BPA, mimics estrogen and can disrupt the endocrine system. Research studies have linked BPA to cancer and serious brain, cardiovascular and reproductive system disorders, particularly when test animals are exposed in the womb and early life.Feinstein.jpg

On Oct. 4, California became the latest and most populous state to bar the ubiquitous, lucrative chemical in baby bottles and sippy cubs. The California legislation was sponsored by EWG, which in 2009 published the first biomonitoring tests to detect BPA in American newborns. EWG’s tests of umbilical cord blood bolstered biomonitoring research by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has found BPA in the bodies of virtually all Americans over age six. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the United States produced 2.4 billion pounds of BPA worth about $2 billion in 2007.

Two days after the California statute became law, the powerful American Chemistry Council declared that it would no longer battle legislative and regulatory efforts to rid baby bottles and sippy cups of BPA. In fact, the ACC actually petitioned the federal Food and Drug Administration to change its regulations to reflect that “BPA is no longer used to manufacture baby bottles and sippy cups and will not be used in these products in the future.” Steve Hentges, Ph.D., of ACC’s Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group, said in a press release,”Although governments around the world continue to support the safety of BPA in food contact materials, confusion about these products has become an unnecessary distraction to consumers, legislators and state regulators.” (The ACC’s categorical statement purports to cover ALL bottles and cups sold in the U.S., but independent research is needed to determine whether some U.S. outlets will still sell cheap BPA-based bottles and sippy cups manufactured overseas.)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), wrote to EWG on Oct. 12 that she intends to press ahead with her own bill, introduced last January, that would impose a federal ban on BPA in all children’s products – not only polycarbonate baby bottles and cups but also cans of infant formula and baby food. Nearly all tin cans are coated on the inside with epoxy resin, which, like polycarbonate plastic, is based on BPA.

“At both the state and federal level, industry has spent millions lobbying against any restrictions on the use of BPA,” Feinstein wrote to EWG. “You helped lead the way in California, and now the chemical industry has realized that consumers, advocates and legislators will not stand down against a chemical that could harm their health.”

Jeremy Jacobs of Greenwire reported Oct. 12 in the New York Times that the American Chemistry Council has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying in California since 2005, and uncounted more through national campaigns online.

For Feinstein, for EWG and other reformers, the next hurdle is the canned food industry, which has been reluctant to abandon epoxy can coatings, claiming that substitutes are not as readily available and cheap. If Feinstein has her way, the industry would be forced to find a new coating material for cans of infant formula and baby food. Reformulation of those products could lead to even more dramatic market changes – because, as a 2007 EWG study documented, many canned foods like soup and soda favored by older kids and teens are also contaminated with BPA leached from can linings.

Feinstein acknowledged that she faces a tough fight. “As you well know, last year the American Chemistry Council prevented a vote in the Senate on precisely what they now seem to be advocating – a national ban on BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups,” Feinstein wrote. “…I know how stubborn this industry has been, and how they have turned a blind eye to the manufacturers, retailers, and states taking action to remove BPA.”

Something To Ponder

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:

“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes,” he told CNBC. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election”.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple!

The people demanded it. That was in 1971 – before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took one (1) year or less to become the law of the land – all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this E-mail to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

_*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*_

1. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.

Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Don’t you think it’s time?

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

YTB Press Release

View the release here: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/YTB-Completes-Travel-iw-2277071846.html

Breaking News From YTB

Sweeping changes are coming soon for those of you who love to sell travel and desire to build your travel business! Are you ready to take your travel business to the next level?

Everything you love about YTB Travel Network is about to become so much more! Now, you’ll have access to an entirely new level of business with a travel company led by industry veterans. And, these veterans are highly respected in the travel industry, which means more commission opportunity for you worldwide! Here’s what to expect over the coming weeks!

1. Everything you love about YTB is staying exactly where it is! You’ll have all the commission percentage opportunities, group booking access, and a fabulous customer facing booking engine (which will be getting a new look!).

2. For those of you who choose to be sellers of travel, you’ll have access to even more travel vendors including all the major cruise lines, tour operators, hotels, airlines and charter organizations, best in class package deals, and even vacation home rentals! And, you’ll book these vendors through your industry-leading agent only booking system! (No more commission claim form to fill out or various usernames and passwords for vendor specific booking engines!)

3. The new travel company will take training from great to extraordinary! With their specialized, in-depth training, we can show you exactly how to be successful—even if you have limited experience in the travel industry! This new training program allows you to become even more knowledgeable in cruising, hotel properties, tour companies, and even destination specialists from some of the vendors who aren’t currently available to you.

4. Plus, it’s more than just travel training. We’ll be showing you how to market your business, when to sell what, how to use CRM and client data, as well as sales techniques to create a more profitable business!

5. Being a part of the travel industry as a travel professional has its perks. And as a member of the new travel company, you’ll have access to more of them! They are accredited with IATAN, and those who meet certain commission requirements may be eligible to receive an IATAN ID card. With this, access to FAM trips, inaugural cruises, and ship positioning cruises where available is all a possibility!

6. We’re also working on an optional A-List program for our top producing Travel Agents. The new travel company has programs that provide travel services to companies across the country. This program would give you access to process bookings generating more commission income for you! More details on this program are coming soon!

This is just a peek at the amazing things coming soon to all of our RTAs and Travel Agents! Get Ready! It’s a whole new world of possibility at YTB Travel Network!

Mobile Marketing

We all know that Z Mobile is an amazing new product available through YTB! But, how is it helping businesses? Who is using it? We just received some amazing testimonials from traditional business owners. Check them out!

“I purchased the Z Mobile Marketing Solution for my business. I put out my very first text blast to only 30 customers, and within a few hours I had made over $300 in sales! I love this application! It paid for itself!” – S.V.

“I was not sure how this could help me as an electrical contractor. After sending out my first text blast reminding customers to get extra outdoor weatherproof outlets installed for their holiday landscaping needs, we set appointments for the week that led to over $4,000 in profits! No postcard or flyer or any direct mail campaign I have EVER done has produced these results. Amazing!” – R.H.

Thanks to our business owners for sharing their wonderful results after using Z Mobile! Let’s keep spreading the word about this great product and how it can help businesses across the country!

An Amazing Company!

I found a company that allows you to take part in a $7 trillion industry worldwide while only $1.3 trillion in the United States! It is expected to double in the next few years. What is so amazing is that this company has an income guarantee program. This is unheard of. There is a Dream Big program where you can win prizes from an ipad and vacation getaway, to a Bentley.

I discovered that you can get your passport and visa here also. You can even book your vacation and get paid for it. There are also tools where you can protect your children on the internet and on their cell phones. If you want to see the beaches of the world, you should check this company out. Text “coachable” to 58203. You will be glad you did!

Travel

Did you know that travel is a 7 trillion dollar industry worldwide? Did you know that it is 1 trillion dollars in the U.S. alone?