The Iduplicate team is constantly finding, evaluating and testing the latest methods for you to leverage the internet so that you can save time, energy, money and becoming highly effective at what you do. They don’t just spout theory…they create real time results. I personally don’t have the time to be searching through Google search results looking for tools and about pages to learn how to reach a wider audience. 

Another cool feature is that they have experts that will be on their forums answering questions that pertain to your business and how you are using social media for internet marketing. People, in the form of global alliance members and the Iduplicate team, will be a tremendous resource for those who know how to network for their projects and business needs.

Just imagine accelerating your business growth by tweaking your business plan to include the vast marketing resources from Iduplicate so that you don’t have to waste time stumbling around the internet looking for answers.  Imagine watching easy to use videos that teach you step-by-step how to use and harness the power of WordPress blogging, Twitter, Facebook, eZine, Stumbleupon, and more.

For these reasons, I am using Iduplicate. It’s worth your consideration.

Up next…Leveraging the internet

Both of my current websites are turbo-charged like my F250 pickup truck and a part of me is shouting “Yee-haw”!  I took the lessons I learned at Iduplicate and applied them to this site and www.TallForeheads.com (Smart People Helping Children with Down Syndrome) and am feeling very confident about getting my message out globally.

I didn’t have the time to go digging around the internet on the vast subject of social media know-how and internet marketing. I was lead to this group by a friend and am still reeling from the amount of knowledge I learned on the subject in one full day of training. The best news is this: In just two weeks, they are launching a site where you can go on a daily basis to learn with the experts.

With the growing number of bloggers on the internet and more people building small businesses whereby they work alone and are responsible for being the proverbial Jack of All Trades –up to and including being your own marketing expert it isn’t easy to stop the world and get off just to learn how to grow your market. Most people who are unfamiliar with social media don’t even know where to begin when it comes to understanding how it can help their business.

This week I will be sharing what I know about Iduplicate in the hopes that you can pick up a thing or two about internet marketing -social media know-how and turbo-boost your website and business.

Iduplicate goes live on January 19th, 2010 and will be accepting a limited number of businesses to work with. The window of opportunity will last for three days. More on that later!

I am currently enjoying the holidays with family and friends and will have regular posts back on tap starting in 2010. In the meantime, all the best for a happy and healthy holiday season…may it be filled with good times, good food and drinks, great people and warm wishes for the year ahead.

Warm regards,
Annie

If you haven’t tried even one of my previous suggestions, I don’t know what to tell you. We’re on day five and it’s my last chance to find a method of inspiration to help you write your daily blog. You probably don’t want to know that I am not pulling my hair out with this assignment because I have trained my brain to just write what needs to be written. I also am here to tell you that writing gets easier with each little accomplishment, aka published blog entry. And, you have to begin building trust within yourself about your writing abilities and ideas.

Perhaps you have great ideas and lots of content but have some fear about your grammar and spelling. Sorry, that’s not a proper excuse! –aren’t you using MS Word or some other word processor with spelling and grammar checks before cutting and pasting your text into your unique blog entry? Look into your excuses…they are disguising the real reason you aren’t writing with ease.

Here’s tip number 5: Look to yourself first. In writing they always say that you should a.) write about what you know best and b.) write about what you are passionate about. If health is your topic of passion, add your personal health to the equation and see where it lands you. Inspirations for writing are alive and well within you. Let your first lesson in health for yourself be a guidepost for you. Tell people what it is about health knowledge that is the inspiration for writing your daily blog. If it isn’t clear to your readers, it probably isn’t your deepest passion and it probably isn’t the topic you know the most about. If this is the case, revisit your heart and mind and hit the restart button.

Side note: If you have tried one of my techniques for gaining inspiration for writing and it worked, please share your experience in the comment section. Thank you!

Here’s my fourth tip of the week to get you going so put your seatbelt on! Get in your car, truck, RV, bike or on a bus and head towards your health food store. We’re using health as the subject this week and I am taking you to your favorite store that pertains to your topic for inspiration for writing your blog.

You can take your readers on a tour of your health food store that you personally shop in and help them understand your approach to better health. As you go down the aisles, look for different things that would spur you on to write about them. Does a particular product make you healthier than others? Are the ingredients in your favorite product superior than others? What do you know about how your health food store is organized? Can you introduce your reader to one of the workers at your health food store in your neighborhood? My point is that you can share with us, your readers, your personal shopping journey and make us feel like it was our journey to our favorite health food store and perhaps by doing so, we will learn how to better shop for supplements or foods and be healthier.

Fresh Fruits and Vegetables at a Market in Allepey, Kerala, India

On the way to and from your health food store that you buy your stuff from, I guarantee you that you will see and hear many things that will be of interest to your readers. What you think about and buy in your health food store will astound them. What about this: what would your ideal health food store look like? What would the customer service be like? Would the staff be any different? Share your ideas!

If an A to Z list and bibliomancy don’t quite create inspirations for writing, you can always try the YouTube Method for inspiring great blog writing. That’s right! Open up a new browser page and bring up YouTube. Since we are using health as the topic example, if you simply type in that word up comes…half a million plus examples! Now, don’t get overwhelmed, simply refine your search with a single word or short phrase. Let’s try homeopathy for teething. Four video examples came up for review. How easy was that?

Inspiration for writing comes in many forms. Could you write a review of the 4 videos we just saw on homeopathy for teething? What if you had your own experience with this subject and could tell that story or make a video testimony about it. Consider how easy it would be to make a short video and summarize the essence of the video in two short paragraphs? What about a short story using photos and text on the subject of homeopathic remedies for teething babies.

Baby Yokel - Dem aren't no front teeth on dis 4 month old...it's dem little ole homeopathic teething tablets.

Let your experience guide you. YouTube is loaded with videos on health that will get your heart and mind racing. There is enough content on YouTube alone that will take you through a lifetime of writing on the subject of health alone. You can also create a table of information on YouTube videos for health that other people could use as a guide or rating system. What if you reviewed each video in a category so that people could easily access the top ten videos of health? You’d be their hero!

If an A to Z list sounds too predictable –as in people might notice that you are writing alphabetically, you can always mix it up. Who said you have to start with “A” anyways? You really ought to go with the one that makes you passionate and excited to begin and not stop writing. “Take the easy throws”, that’s what my ultimate Frisbee coach always said to us; it was another way of saying “keep it simple”.

The second technique I will share with you to unlock your brain and get you writing again and often is something I call “Bibliomancy”. Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. Simply open a book, hopefully a book that is on your topic, and start reading the paragraph that catches your eye. Using health as an example, I just so happen to have a copy of “Eat Fat, Lose Fat” by Dr. Mary Enig, PhD and Sally Fallon, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation sitting next to me. I randomly opened it to Chapter 7 on page 134 and it is talking about “Health Recovery”. I read on and find it is very exciting and it is beginning to create multiple inspirations for writing that could easily span a whole month!

Take some notes, then discard your notes so that your inspiration for writing comes from your heart and mind with just the essence of what you learned. The point is to get inspired, not report on what the author of the book you picked up wrote; although, if you do quote from the book, be sure to cite it properly.

Happy blogging!

So you need some inspiration for writing. Who doesn’t?

Well, I have just the thing! This A-Z technique I am about to teach you can carry you through every month since there are 5 blogging days a week (22 to 23 days a month on average) –and 26 letters in the English alphabet. That gives you three or four letters that you can opt out of using, such as Q, X, Y and maybe Z.

Step 1 – Open up a new document in MS Word or whatever word processing software tool you use and make an A-to-Z list.

Save it as, for example, “December2009_AZList.”

Using the premise that you are writing a blog about health, fill in a topic or subject that you know about that starts with the letter “A”.  Continue down the list of letters writing one or two words next to each letter. Here’s a partial list to show you how easy this could be:

A – Vitamin A
B – Vitamin B
C – Cholesterol, the good and bad news, or myths about
D – Vitamin D
E – Eructations…eh, excuse me, I mean burps
F – Freckles and your face
G – Gout
H – Homeopathy, happiness, health, heart, hemoglobin, hair, HIV, halitosis, hormones

Step 2 – Open up your adword tool, such as Google’s and type in a short phase with your first topic, in this example, Vitamin A. The tool will respond with a list of popular search phrases that ought to give you some amazing inspiration for writing on your first topic. Remember to write on topics that have a search volume between 200 and 500. Here’s a sampling of the results Vitamin A gave me.

excessive vitamin A = 480 to 320 (current month and last month respectively)
fruits with Vitamin A = 390 to 320
foods containing vitamin A = 590 to 720 (a bit high but close enough to include in your text)
RDA of vitamin A = unknown to 210 (results are not calculated due to insufficient data and last months report)

Step 3 – Get busy with this latest inspiration for writing a blog entry! Your vitamin A blog entry has practically been written for you at this point…just remember to use one of those keyword phrases in your title, repeat your title and bold it in the body area, and use the keyword phrase in your 250+ word blog entry several times.

Just a quick heads up since the event is two days away. I am loving what I am learning from Scott Magers who is one of the founders of both PitchIn.com and iDuplicate.com –both of which will be launching in Q1 of 2010. Well…all this slightly cynical girl from Silicon Valley, with a background in traditional marketing, can say is “wow, wow, wow!!!”

Believe me, their credibility is quite high. I’ve personally met half of the people presenting and am looking forward to hearing from the others. These people have proved their success on the web ($600M in online sales in 7 years).

It’s really been an extremely relevant, highly informative and practical undertaking for today’s market. Personally, I am using their info to power blog on 2 sites and plan to add two more for my art work and another for travel and food stuff. My webstats are climbing dramatically on this recently launched site and I haven’t even told anyone about this –just as a test in obscurity and using their success formula. My weekly stats show that I have surpassed my previous month, and it can only get better once I get through my really long checklist of things I need to do to build my subscriber base. I can’t wait! This has been the “shot in the arm” I have been hoping for in my career. I’ll confess, things were getting a bit dull.

If you don’t have a clue about which way to turn in today’s online marketspace, or need to optimize your web presence, or want to start from scratch with today’s hottest know how, this special one day Internet money-making training in Irvine on 12/12/09 will put you in power mode. This is an excellent crash course in social media marketing (using a website with blog+Facebook+Twitter+dozens more social sites+Search Engine Optimization help+how to use affiliate marketers to help you sell your biz: products and services) for today’s business professional. Reinvent yourself!

Please feel free to forward this to people you think might be interested in improving their business presence on the web or learning how to get a website up the right way for todays market.

Feel free to ask me any questions you might have in the comment section.

Hope to see you there!

If you want to create gallery quality work, linen canvas, per the traditionalists, is the way to go. The most superior quality linen canvas comes out of Belgium where it has been cultivated specifically for the art market. Linen duck canvas is made from the flax plant which has been woven into fabric. These fibers are long in nature and tend to have a stronger tensile strength to them than the shorter cotton fibers. Linen can be twisted into a fine, tight strand and woven into a canvas duck that is extremely durable and fine textured. The finer the linen, the finer the texture of linen canvas and the more expensive. However, linen, with its natural slubs is often sought after for its texture in a painting and a rough fabric texture is often a desirable trait in a canvas.

Linen canvas is somewhat difficult to stretch because it doesn’t yield to the stretcher bars the way canvas does. Nature imbued this fiber with some interesting characteristics: it is more resilient to moisture because of inherent oils –yet primes easily; handles contractions due to hot and cold atmosphere changes; and is resistant to various types of decay.  The stiffness of the fabric is what makes it desirable as a painting support and its durability –or longevity over the years excites art collectors.

Linen canvases are often hand oiled or painted with a lead based oil paint as a primer to create a super smooth finish for Realism-style portrait work. This alone can raise the price.

Cotton duck canvas, on the other hand, is made from cotton fibers which are shorter than linen and come from, surprise! the cotton plant. Cotton can be woven to any degree of fineness, but it will always be less expensive than linen due to its availability, ease of growing, harvesting and manufacturing. Also, cotton reaches its limit when it comes to larger paintings: it can’t support the weight of itself and the paint combined. This is where the competition shines. Cotton canvas can be made be just as durable as linen and go the distance, so don’t feel bad if the price of linen makes it a bit more cost prohibitive. Cotton is just fine for all your painting needs until you reach canvas sizes exceeding 6′ in either direction. Heavy cotton duck canvas can be fine for larger size canvases, but consult with the experts to make sure that it won’t fail you on the first day of your art show!