When you have your website up and running, and your mailing list, a really fun thing to do is to have a competition. It's easy, it's a bit of fun, it's newsworthy and it gives you the opportunity to engage with your visitors/subscribers in a different way for a change.

There are also other benefits.

I was asked the other day, "How can I sell more of these training DVDs? Do you know any places on the Internet where many people get together who would be good customers and buy them?" I thought about it and said, "Have you done a benefits analysis?" The person looked confused and said, "No, you misunderstand, I just want to sell more of them, see?"

There are 4 new free ebooks on internet, marketing and money in our downloads library as from today:

So, I moderate the MindMillion news group. And talk comes to writing advertisements, as it does.

And some members of the list are tying themselves into ever decreasing knots of pain with all the marketing books and good "advice" on how to "construct" a sales page, to the degree that NOTHING WAS BEING ACCOMPLISHED AT ALL any longer.

After weeks of revisions, toing and froing, hacking, cutting, pasting, deleting, stitching, stretching, messing with this and that and everything, there was NO LIFE LEFT in their sales pages, in their writing WHATSOEVER!

That's when I wrote the following to the list because I couldn't stand it anymore!

Silvia writes: Heyho, and I'm fresh from the first "Dragon's Den Party"! How GOOD is that!
With any second series, you get a bit scared that it might have gone downhill or wasn't as good as you remembered it to be - but I'm happy to report that it was, completely :-) We had four featured victims in the Dragon's Den as always and another half a dozen, of whose dismemberment we were only given brief glimpses and bloody highlights :-)

John Lessnau writes: Three or four years ago a massive link trading campaign could get your site to the top of the Search Engine Rankings (SERPs). However, things are changing quickly concerning reciprocal links. Companies like LinkAdage are receiving increased reports that reciprocal links are becoming a less effective part of SEO. In fact, it now seems sites that go overboard with reciprocal link campaigns are getting penalized in the SERPs by having most of their reciprocal links completely ignored by the search engines.

Once a cherished project such as your first ebook or ecourse has been completed, we need to turn our attention to the marketing of your project. Here's where things sometimes turn somewhat difficult if the author and the marketeer are one and the same person, and here's where we have to be cautious and take the right steps in the right order, so we might stay on track. Here is the MOST IMPORTANT and FIRST STEP you need to take - before you even start marketing!

Silvia writes: Yesterday I came across something I'd quite forgotten about - and that is the MARVELLOUS Serif company.

They are completely unique in the way they do their business, and very, very interesting as a model.

This is not relevant to the topic however, only in so far as these guys have EXCELLENT free software that anyone can download and run forever and without restrictions.

Silvia Hartmann writes: All the experts across all the ages, all of time space agree - if you can't visualise your goals, create cohesive thoughtfields that your conscious mind can look to for guidance, and your unconscious mind to use your own powers of reality creation, you're pretty well shafted. I have recently given a live seminar and I was *shocked* to discover how diffuse, nebulous and un-REAL people's goals were! That's like wandering about in a fog - how ARE you going to find your way?! Well, the MindMillion Book Of The Month - September 2005 - I Create Reality by Christopher Westra should help!

I saw a reference to the term "fat cat" as I was in the middle of doing some little bitsy thing on one of my sites, one of those that you know is not going to make you RICH, it's just a question of sending perhaps 20 visitors a month one way, instead of another.

It then occurred to me that there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Fisher Swanson writes: Publishing articles and making them available for free can be a very effective way of promoting your business or website without spending a lot of money. This article contains some tips and resources that I have discovered by publishing free reprint articles over the last 5 years.

Look at this, my good friends and fellow entrepreneurs. This is an advertisement spam which just landed in my inbox (with the soft thwank of BS hitting the lawn from not too high a height).

Who is fishing for fools here ...?

S1SFX is a wonderful story of a real life goal accomplished, and what that feels like. There is more to this, including that this car was manifest directly by the "cars exercise" in a most remarkable way - this is a reality creation product more than a consumer object. It was the final test that MM worked in the real world, and it did mean a lot. Here is a repost of the original story, written for The StarFields Network just before Christmas 2004.

Note: The delighted responses from Silvia's friends are an integral part of this. It is ONLY when you can be sincerely delighted with other people's achievements that you can achieve yourself!

I've just been watching THE most extraordinary TV programme.  

It's called Dragon's Den, runs currently on BBC 2 TV and it involves five real multi-millionaires with their own money to invest and half a dozen fledgling wannabe entrepreneurs who are pitching their inventions and business ideas to get investment from between 50,000 and 150,000.