Philips Livable Cities - Latest to Reward Great Ideas

If you think of corporate America as cold, hard, and uncaring, you’re not alone. But several big companies have stepped up recently to prove they too have heart and want to help make our world a better place to live in.

The latest company with such a goal is Philips. Known for their electronics manufacturing of everything from MRI machines to big screen TVs, Philips has recently announced The Philips Livable Cities Award. This global initiative is designed to encourage and promote practical, achievable ideas for furthering the health and well-being of those living in cities throughout the world. As urbanization continues to spread throughout the world, and cities become more populated, common problems arise. Social, economic, and environmental challenges are growing rapidly and will continue to plague urban centers as populations become denser.

Philips recognizes that these issues require innovative solutions that will more than likely be presented by people within the entrepreneurial community. That’s why they’ve launched the Livable Cities initiative and are seeking input from those within that community.

So what do you get for solving the world’s problems? When you enter the Philips initiative in one of three categories (Healthy Lifestyle at Work & Home, Independent Living, or Well-being Outdoors), you have a chance to be awarded one of three grants, totaling $125,000, to help translate your idea into reality. Entries will be accepted through October of this year, reviewed by an international panel of experts, and awards will be announced in April of 2011.

So, do you have a simple idea that could improve the health and well-being of people living in cities? What are you waiting for? Watch the video to learn more, and then click this link to get started: www.because.philips.com

Great Royalty Free Images - Why They Matter, and Where to Get Them

We’ve all heard the cliché, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  While it’s an overused phrase, the reason it’s used so much is that it’s absolutely true.  Pictures communicate to us better than words alone can.  They elicit feelings and emotion; they can explain complex concepts at a glance; and they can make an otherwise boring website come alive.  That’s why many of the best and most professional blogs you find will include a picture with each post.  Finding the right picture to go with your articles might add a few minutes to the time it takes you to create a post, but the extra time is well worth it.

There are some important guidelines to remember when choosing images for you site or blog though.  If you want to make an impact, not just any image will do, and there are legal considerations to take into account as well.  While it’s not always easy to find the right image to go with a post or page on your site, taking a little time to make a conscious decision about your images is important.  Some titles lend themselves to easily finding an image.  For example, a title like, “10 Great iPhone Apps,” would be easy to find an image for.  Just look for a good picture of an iPhone!  But even then, a picture of an iPhone with the screen full of apps communicates your post’s message better than a guy holding an iPhone might.

As for legal considerations, it’s important to know that not every image out there on the net is fair game.  In fact, unless you have express permission to use an image (permission from the actual owner of the image), it’s not ok to post it on your site.  There is a misconception by some that as long as you give credit somewhere on the page, you’re in the clear.  This is not the case.  In some cases, an image owner who has shared an image on a photo-sharing site, like Flickr, will attach a creative commons license to his or her photo and specifically say that it can be used with attribution (credit given).  This is the only case where a simple mention of the image owner is enough to make its use legal.  In other cases, an image owner in the same situation will give full rights, without attribution, which allows you to use the image freely in whatever way you want.  This is more unusual, and the images you find with this kind of license aren’t always very useful, but they do exist.

The bottom line on image permissions is that you can only use an image on your site in one of three cases:

1. You have express permission from the image owner. (Might or might not require attribution)
2. You purchased the right to use the image.
3. You are the image owner because you took the picture (or created the graphic).

Note: Even in the first two cases, there might be restrictions as to how you can use an image (i.e. commercial use vs. personal use), so watch out for that as well.

Ok, so now that we’re clear that images are important and what’s ok and not ok legally, where do you find great images for your site?  There are a lot of free and paid sources to consider for quality images. Here are some of the best:

Paid Sites

iStockphoto - iStockphoto is the internet’s original member-generated image and design community. You get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe, royalty-free photographs, and more.  You have the option of signing up for a subscription, or using their pay-as-you-go plan.  Generally, images will end up costing you from $.99 each and up, depending on the image size and your plan.

Shutterstock - Shutterstock is the service we use for Blogtrepreneur.com, and our sister site, YoungEntrepreneur.com.  They boast being the largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world, and they provide a massive library of high-quality, unique images.  You have a choice of their 25-a-day subscription, which allows you to download up to 25 images of any size each day (costing as little as $.33 per image on the one-month plan, if you max it out for one month), or you can choose their on-demand plan, which will end up costing you about $4 - $10 an image, depending on your needs.

Corbis - This site is a little more artsy and fairly pricy.  They have a very attractive UI, for what that’s worth, but you’ll pay from $15 and up per image and a lot more if you plan to use the image in print.  Rather than a subscription model, you pay per image, and the fee varies widely, depending on how you plan to use the image.  If you’re publishing a magazine or a site where you want celebrity images or very high-end graphics, Corbis might be a good match.

Getty Images - Getty is the leading provider of digital media worldwide.  Like Corbis, they charge by the image, and for royalty-free images (the kind you’ll most likely want to use), you’ll pay upwards of $10 for a small image (170 px square) and $25 or more for a 230 px + image.  The only advantage to Getty is that they have very high quality images, and a lot of them.

Free Sites

Flickr Creative Commons - If you don’t want to pay for images and don’t mind weeding through a lot of pics to find the right one, Flickr’s creative commons area is a great resource.  They list six degrees of creative commons licenses with explanations of each.  With as many as 40 million+ images for a given license type, you’ll surely be able to find something worth using.  Be careful though. If an image looks like it’s a pro shot, it might not actually belong to the person who uploaded it, and you might get a nasty email from the actual owner!

Stock.XCHNG - This site was recently bought by Getty Images but has been around since 2001. They offer free stock images of pretty good quality.  It will be more difficult to find just the right image on SXC than on one of the paid sites, and the images are generally from amateur photographers and illustrators, but you might have an easier time than sifting through a million results on Flickr.

Google and Yahoo image search - Here’s where you have to be careful.  You’ll find millions of results for any image subject you’re looking for on both Google and Yahoo, but chances are, you won’t have permission to use them.  If you do find a great image using this method, try asking the site owner where the image is displayed if you can use it.  As long as they’re the actual owner of the image, they might not have an issue with it and just ask that you give them credit.

Hopefully this post gives you some good ideas and resources for adding images to your site and blog.  There are a lot of other image resources out there too.  Which ones do you use?  Share them with us in the comments!

How to Stalk Your Customers Like a Pro

Imagine going into your local electronics store, Joe’s Electronics, to look at a new flat-screen TV.  You check out the various models, talk with a sales person, and decide to think it over.  You’ve heard Best Buy has some good deals, and maybe you’ll head over there tomorrow to see what they’ve got.  As you walk toward your car, you encounter a guy wearing a Joe’s Electronics t-shirt.  You start your car and can’t help but be shocked by the coincidence as a Joe’s Electronics commercial comes on the radio.  Driving a little ways down the road, you notice a Joe’s Electronics billboard, featuring the TV you were looking at, then another similar billboard on the next block.  You get home to find a direct mail piece from Joe’s Electronics with your favorite TV highlighted, and when you flip on the TV (your old one), the first commercial you see is for - what else - Joe’s Electronics.

If this happened in real life you might be a little weirded out, but aside from that you’d probably pretty impressed with Joe’s.  You’d think they must have one heck of an ad budget, first of all, and they would have accomplished getting their message in front of you the seven times that researchers say are necessary, on average, for a person to see it before they buy.

Of course in the offline world, advertising is somewhat of a shotgun approach, so to get the kind of coverage that any specific person would see this much would take many thousands of dollars.  Online though, this kind of targeted marketing is becoming easier all the time.  A relatively new trend in online advertising, retargeting, is taking off in a big way.  Basically, the way retargeting works is that it allows you to present targeted ads to visitors to your site who don’t make a purchase.  After the non-buyer leaves your site, these ads are presented all over the internet using a number of ad networks, via tracking cookies.

If you have an ecommerce site or sell anything at all online, there are a few providers of this service you’ll want to look at.

FetchBack - Using what their patent-pending FIDO technology, FetchBack claims to be the only company that offers retargeting specific analytics.  This translates into saved time and strong ROI. On June 1^st, FetchBack announced they had been acquired by GSI Commerce, which will allow them to bring even more value to customers, as GSI is a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing solutions.

AdRoll - Founded in 2006, AdRoll believes online advertising should be easy for small to medium-sized businesses to implement and understand.  AdRoll offers precise targeting through Google, OpenX, AdBrite, AdMeld and others, and their feature-rich retargeting product, RoundTrip, promises the best performing placements for site-targeted campaigns.

Specific Media - Located at Retargeting.com, Specific Media offers multiple levels of service depending on your advertising goals. Their Premium service is comprised of over 450 ‘Brand Name’ web publishers, such as, ABC, ABCNews, Gannett Newspaper Group, ESPN, FoxNews, FoxSports, Major League Baseball, NBC, NYTimes, The Weather Channel, CBS, CBSNews, Food Network, and others, whereas their Performance level product is a large aggregate of small to medium websites that are not known ‘Brands’ and typically wouldn’t attract the advertising budgets from large agencies or advertisers.

Google AdWords - You know when Google gets in the game the trend is usually here to stay, and they did just that in March of this year.  They call the feature “remarketing” and you can easily set up and create a remarketing campaign through the new “Audiences” tab in AdWords.

Any of these services will allow you to retarget your customers (or would-be customers) by “stalking” them after they leave your site.  If you, like many, are averse to tracking cookies and feel like this is, in some way, a violation of privacy, this technique probably isn’t for you.  On the other hand, if all that doesn’t bother you and you’re looking for an effective way to convert your visitors to buyers, retargeting might just be the answer you’ve been looking for.  If you are using retargeting or have tried it, help out the community by sharing your experience in the comments bellow.

3 Steps and 3 Resources for Finding Profitable Niches

Finding a profitable niche is the best way to make money online without working in a highly competitive market. For those who want to make money without competing with the “big dogs” then learning how to find profitable niches is a lesson that shouldn’t be missed.

Learning how to find profitable niches becomes something that every experienced internet marketer must learn at one point or another. Since one of the more lucrative aspects of internet marketing is offering your own products and services why not learn how to spot a valuable niche to take over? Simply being an affiliate your entire online marketing career can get boring and more competitive-so why not pave the way in your own niches? Generally speaking learning how to identify and exploit a new niche is relatively easy to do. Let’s take a look at a few simple steps to get started.

Step #1 - Start researching and communicating with consumers. If you’re going to uncover a niche a good way to get started is to find out what people want or need that they can’t currently get. This can be anything from a way to cure their headaches to a way to start their own lawn mowing business. Find information, a product or service that people want and see if there is a demand for it.

Step #2 - Find a way to get these people what they want or need. If you can’t offer the product or service to a hungry consumer base then someone else will-it’s just a matter of time. When you’re the first in a new niche that you think might be profitable it’s important you offer something that will fix their problem and fill their needs. Can you write an eBook and sell it to your market? Can you offer them a program or software application that fixes their problem? Figure out a way to generate something you can sell to this market that will fill their need and make you money.

Step #3 - Make sure you can make money long term with your niche. If you create a product and start offering it in your niche and you’re not making sales, there could be a problem. Assuming everything else is good (your landing page, your sales copy, your product, etc.) this might not be a “buying niche”-meaning you may have tapped into traffic that does in fact have a problem but they aren’t willing to pay money for the solution. If this is the case you’re in trouble and should evaluate any other potential niche to make sure it’s a “buying niche” before trying to break into it. This can be done by targeting what’s called “desperate buyers”-or people who have no choice but to pay for the solution. Niches that are an example of this include male enhancement, weight loss and acne cures but there are many others.

Learning how to find profitable niches seems simple and obvious on the surface but there’s a lot more than meets the eye. As you can see it really is as simple as finding a hungry niche and providing a solution, but it’s also important to look deeper and make sure that niche is willing to pay money for the solution and will be a viable long term strategy. There are a few tools that can actually make finding profitable niches a lot easier, let’s take a look at a few of them.

43Things.com - This website is a great place to go to see what people want to learn more about or find a solution for. On the website there are different things that people want to do that they’ve collectively voted on. The larger the word or phrase in the tag cloud is the more people are interested in it. This is a great way to find out what a good profitable niche might be since people list things like “learn how to play basketball” and “finally discover how to make a gourmet pizza.”

Yahoo! Answers - Another excellent way to find out what people want is to go through Yahoo! answers and see what people are asking about. Users will post questions like “How do I fix my computer to make it run faster?” or “How can I make French fries at home?” While these questions seem basic and boring they are questions that a large number of people want to know the answer to. Perusing the questions and answers on Yahoo! is a great way to get ideas for possible profitable niches.

Ask500People.com - This website is a great way to take a possible profitable niche and see if there’s a demand for it. Let’s say you think it’d be a good idea to target a new niche that involves teaching people how to make their own chess boards. Heading on over to this website will allow you to post a question like “Would you prefer to learn how to create your own chess board or just purchase a low quality one from a store?” and then receive feedback one way or another on the proposed question. Think of this website as your profitable niche “barometer” allowing you to see what unbiased people think of your idea.

Using online tools and carefully researching different niches is the only sure-fire way for finding a good profitable niche. Once you discover how to find profitable niches over time it’ll become easier and almost second nature to identify potentially profitable markets. Making money from new niches can be difficult and there is a certain risk involved so try to minimize your losses and maximize your gains as much as possible. In other words, don’t invest too much until you know it’s worth the money.

Whether you want to find a profitable niche to create your own product in or a profitable niche to promote an affiliate product in the process and technique really is the same. Make sure there’s a need for the product and make sure people are prepared to spend money for the solution. Without these two requirements there’s little room to make money in a niche.

Jason Acidre is a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates.

8 Really Cool Web-Based Tools for Bloggers

Looking for cool applications to help you make your blog or site all it can be?  We’ve found some good ones!  From ways to make sure your site looks good no matter who’s looking at it, to protecting your privacy and your content, these tools are all easy to use and either free or very low-priced.  And they’re all web-based, so no downloading to your computer necessary.

tynt insight - tynt.com is a tool you can use to keep track of what’s being copied from your site, ensuring proper credit is given while capitalizing on the copying you want.  This tool not only helps you track down content thieves, it helps to improve your SEO and traffic by generating more links back to your site and providing automatic attribution links.  You’ll download this software to your server, but not to your computer. Cost: Free

TestSize - As you probably know, your screen resolution is not the same as that of all your visitors.  So even if your site looks spectacular on your computer, it might look funky on someone else’s.  Want to see exactly what it looks like in various resolutions? That’s what TestSize.com is for.  Just enter your URL and choose which size you want to see, and you’ll get a view of your site from that resolution.  It’s a great way to put yourself in your site visitors’ shoes.  Cost: Free

Stribe - This is a great way to take your blog or site to the next level.  You have followers, readers, and subscribers now, but have your really created a community?  Stribe lets you do that.  It’s an easy way to instantly create a social network on any website.  Stribe is an easy plug-and-play solution that allows you to customize its features and build your blog into a community of users, all connected with each other - and with you.  Cost: Free (while in beta)

ShrinkTheWeb - This simple tool does exactly what the name says.  It takes any web page (home page only, unless you upgrade to pro) and creates screenshots that can be used in blog posts or other content areas on your site.  With one click, you get six different sizes of screenshots, from 320×240 down to a 75×56 thumbnail.  Cost: Basic = Free; Pro = $34.95/mo

iPadPeek - With over a million iPads sold so far and growing, you can bet some of your readers are looking at your site on one.  So how do you make sure your site looks good on the iPad if you don’t own one yourself?  Easy - just click over to iPadPeek.  You enter any web address at the top of the virtual iPad, and the site appears below just as it looks on the real thing.  Pretty slick! Cost: Free

IMG4Me - Want to display your email address on your contact page without getting a ton of spam?  You could do something like “myname [at] mysite.com” which is pretty common, but not as cool as what IMG4Me lets you do.  With this txt to img service, you can put your email address in the text box, choose your parameters, like text color, font, and font size, and the app will generate an image of your text.  And they’ll even host the resulting image for you.  Cost: Free

fivesecondtest - Want to know what people see when they first look at your site?  That’s what Five Second Tests do for you.  You earn “karma” by looking at other people’s sites and giving feedback on them, which allows you to upgrade your own tests when you’re having your site looked at.  There are some pretty cool options for tests, and you get results fast.  Ad agencies charge thousands of dollars to conduct this kind of research, so this can be a very valuable tool!  Cost: Free (unless you want premium features)

Browsera - There are a lot of browser options these days, and you can’t assume that just because you prefer Firefox, Safari, or Chrome all your site’s visitors have the same preference.  Believe it or not, some people still use IE!  In any case, just as with screen resolutions, your site might look very different from one browser to the next, and while it might look really good in your browser, it might be completely messed up in another (not to mention the various versions of all the browsers).  Browsera not only allows you to see what your site looks like in various browsers and their many versions, but it points out potential problems, like layout issues, JavaScript errors, and more. Cost: Free (with limited options - $39-$99/mo for more options)

There you go!  Some cool tools to make your site the best it can be.  We’re always looking for new, innovative solutions to improve the look, feel and functionality of websites, so if you have other nifty solutions, don’t hesitate to share in the comments!

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