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As with any professional relationship, it is important to be able to communicate effectively and feel comfortable doing so. However, first thing’s first: you need to be able to evaluate your lawyer’s work ethic and performance.

So now that you’ve hired a lawyer and you’re beginning to work together on your legal matters for your business, it’s a good time to step back to see just how effective their work has been. You will not see overnight results and should not expect to see improvements in every facet of your business; however, you should expect an improvement in organization and financial matters.

During the time the lawyer has been hired by you, what have the results been? Have you benefited by having properly drafted contracts to send out to clients? Have you been able to better keep track of your intellectual property and ensure that your company never infringes on the rights of others? Or, have you been able to draft an employee handbook with an up to date discrimination policy section? Essentially, what you want to see is that your lawyer has done what you needed. They have taken your needs and fulfilled them.

Anything less than satisfaction is grounds for searching for another lawyer.

So far, I’ve made it sound like all of the responsibility lies with the lawyer in order to make a successful working relationship. However, you play a major role in how their work turns out as well.

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As you understand from the previous chapter, there are grants available for businesses at the federal, state and local levels that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. Now we will take a more in-depth look at some of the places where you can begin your search for grants that will meet your specific needs.

The Single Best Reference For Finding Grants

This is the largest, and likely, the single-best reference on where to find grants at the federal and state levels of the grant pipeline.

This website is a portal to a database of all types of Federal programs that would benefit state and local governments, Indian tribes, public and private for-profit and non-profit groups, special groups and individuals. This database gives you information about specific grants, and then you can contact the specific office that is in charge of the grant to learn how to apply for it.

You can narrow your search by looking at their Assistance Programs listings page, or you can do a wide sweeping search of all the programs they have listed. Each topic, for example the Agricultural Research-Basic and Applied Research topic, has a corresponding program number that precedes it, which refers to the federal department that is in charge of the particular grant and the numerical order of grants. They will list the type of assistance offered, in this case project grants, and they will tell you how you can and cannot use the grant money. They will list the eligibility requirements, in this case a non-profit university or college or a non-profit research organization.

It can also give information about how to apply and what their evaluation procedure is for the applications and how they award the grant. You will also see what the deadlines are to apply, and how long it will take them to get back to you and let you know if you were awarded the grant or not.

Some grants also have requirements for after the time you have received a grant, which can include things like reports and audits. You can also learn how much money they usually award, and contacts to ask questions. They helpfully also might list related programs. These are other places where you will want to explore to see if your grant proposal will work for these other programs because they are similar to the one at which you are currently looking.

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Now that you know why you should market on the Internet, where to find a great online business that will work for you, and when to start your business and marketing campaigns, it is time to learn how you can go about doing it!

Free instant Internet business: Just add blog

You should now possess a basic understanding of the key ingredients for successful Internet businesses. You need a product or service, you need customers to target, and you need a website to reach them.

If you already have a website, you're one step ahead of the game. However, if you don't yet have your own business website, you can get one that is free, easy to maintain, and can be set up in about thirty minutes with a specialized website form called a blog.

What in the world is a blog? The word is short for "web log", and refers to a website that is set up like an online journal: you can "post" to your blog as often as you want, and you can add pictures, sound, and graphics to your posts. Blogs are one of the most interactive media forms available online— with the comments feature, visitors can leave notes on your blog to let you know what they like or dislike about your products or services, and what they would like to see in the future.

Blogs are not used only for business. In fact, there are millions of personal blogs that Internet users have created just to connect with other like-minded souls. The popularity of blogs has spawned a whole new subsection of the Internet that is commonly called the "blogosphere" and involves bloggers (people who blog) linking to other blogs, reading and commenting regularly on other blogs, and enjoying many visitors and commenters in return.

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Maybe you remember the old elementary school project "making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich." In this project, students are asked to create a set of instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then the instructions are followed by another set of students. The results are sometimes hilarious, and often disastrous—not because of the inability to follow instructions, but because of the incomplete or vague instructions that they began with.

People who have been developing software for decades still wonder how to effectively articulate their needs and the end results that they want to see. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet, no unbeatable approach that always produces great results. However, there are some tools and processes you can use to get the best possible articulation of your needs.

Interestingly, one way to get a good articulation of needs is to hire a software developer with good communication skills! A good software developer will ask questions, provide a series of releases of the software, and listen to the person who's buying the software and make adjustments as new information flows in. Providers and users may well know their needs intuitively, but they will often be at a loss when asked to articulate those needs clearly and specifically. Good software developers know this and make adjustments for it.

Some very small projects can have their needs articulated verbally. If you want an Excel macro that will copy data from one spreadsheet to another, it isn't generally necessary to go through all of the steps we are about to outline. Projects that are more complex than that—particularly when combined with the vagaries of outsourcing the development process to someone who isn't working just down the hall—need a more formal approach.

Just as builders have developed standards for blueprints, years of software development processes have stimulated the evolution of an entire set of documents for articulating software development needs. We will discuss those documents, and provide some tips on how to create them most effectively.

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One of the great things ClickBank has to offer is a virtual ARMY of affiliates.

What this means to you is an instant database of thousands of affiliates that are ready, willing and waiting to promote your product for you.

They want to make you loads of sales all at their advertising and web traffic expense because they will make a share in the profit your product pulls in based on all the sales they refer!

This is a serious win/win because these affiliates know that you spent your time, and or hard earned dollars to create your product, and all they have to do is refer sales to share in the profits on your labor!

You win because you now have a method to make sales you otherwise would not have if it were not for your new instant army of affiliates ready to promote your new product for you starting today!

What a great concept ClickBank is for not only the product creator and seller but also for the massive number of people that make a great living just selling other peoples products as an affiliate!

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Chapter 6 Creating Engaging Content

Everyone who publishes a blog has two main goals in common. These goals are to bring people in to read their blog and to keep readers coming back to read it as often as possible. Regardless of anything else you do or don't do with your own blog, these must be your two main goals as well. If you do not have visitors to your blog, and those visitors do not click on your AdSense ad links, then you will not make any money with your blog. It is just that plain and simple.

What Should I Write About on My New Blog?

You have gone through the process of setting-up your blog, you have AdSense strategically placed on it for maximum clicks, and now you find yourself with zero idea what to write about. Been there, done that, bought the proverbial t-shirt. Most of us with our own blogs have been in the exact same position. We want to blog, we know how to write a decent paragraph or two, but faced with the blank text box on Blogger we sit and stare at it. We think to ourselves that no one wants to read what we have to say. Or, worse yet, we can't think of a single thing to write about. We have temporary blog writer's block. Don't worry, there are simple solutions to the problem.

One of the best ways to build-up a popular blog, translation -one which has the potential to earn you lots of money, is to have both frequently updated, engaging, content and good ad placement. In my humble opinion, ad placement is the easy part. The hard part, at least at first, is thinking of a topic which you can write about day after day.

You quite literally have unlimited options as to what you can write about on your blog. However, this can be more of a curse than a blessing. It's like a child walking into a toy store who has been told they can have anything they want. It is overwhelming. What do they choose? There are so many options. Being told "write about anything you want" is similarly overwhelming; there are just too many options available to you.

To help you decide what the topic of your blog should be, it is important to understand a bit about how search engines and AdSense work. If you were simply interested in publishing a personal, non-monetized blog, then you could write about anything you wanted. You would send the link to your friends and family, post updates about your life on it from time to time, and you would be good to go. However, if you want a monetized blog, then you need to understand how to get visitors to come to your blog, how to make them keep coming back, and how to make the most amount of money possible from your visitors clicking on your AdSense ads.

We will examine Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the inter-workings of AdSense more in other chapters of this ebook. For now it is vital to the success of your blog that you understand that knowing a bit about how both SEO and AdSense work can be a big help in deciding what you should blog about.

If you are interested in making money with your blog, then you want to find topics which will bring you traffic through the search engines. Search engine optimization can help to bring you some readers, fresh content keeps all of your readers coming back and relevant AdSense ads on your blog help to get you the clicks that make you money.

Just simply looking at search engine optimization or AdSense will not guarantee your blog success with any specific topic. However the additional information search engine optimization and AdSense provides can help to steer you in the right direction with your blog. Use these two things as guidelines in building your blog and all of your content. It will be to your advantage to do so.

So, how do you really come up with a topic for your blog?

Think long and hard about your life. Think about your skills. What do you do for work? What do you like to do in your spare time? What are your hobbies? What are your unique skills? Do you have children? Do you have pets? What are your dreams and aspirations? What is unique about you? What is unique about what you know versus what other people know? You can easily use the answers to these questions in your quest to find a good blog topic.

If you have trouble answering the questions above then find someone close to you and ask them to answer the questions about you. Find out what others would suggest you might want to publish a blog about. Often you cannot see what is right before you, but others who are close to you can. You might be surprised at the great ideas they might come up with for you. Listen to their suggestions. Answer the questions for yourself, and decide on a good topic.

The most important thing you can do is to blog about something interesting, both interesting to you and to other people. Something you either know a lot about, or have the desire to learn a lot about. For example, I may find that a topic like "lime green paint" would be good blog topic for search engine optimization and AdSense, however after about three posts then what would I write about that could possibly be interesting to anyone? There probably isn't much after those first three posts to write about. This would make lime green paint probably not the best topic for my blog.

You will need to strike a balance between search engine optimization, AdSense ad block placement, your knowledge of your potential topic, and your interests.

Finding a topic you like and are knowledgeable about helps you be able to write interesting posts. Your posts do not have to be brilliant works of literary art. They simply have to be engaging, interesting, and most of all fairly frequent. You will find blogging to be the easiest and most enjoyable if you pick a good topic for yourself.

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Some people find writing articles quite easy. But almost all article writers will agree that the hardest part of article writing is the headline, or the title of the article. You see, before anything gets said or done, that headline must draw the potential reader to the article. It must say ‘Psstt… look over here. This is the information you need.’

The fact of the matter is that with the Internet, the entire world is on information overload. We are literally overdosing on it to the point where we’ve become picky about what we look at. We don’t scan articles – we scan headlines, and then decide to read articles based on those headlines. Even then, we scan the first paragraph or two to decide if we are going to read the entire article, word-for-word. But it all starts with the headline.

Is it any wonder that this is the most stressful part of article writing? Furthermore, many people start writing their article with only a vague idea of where they are going with it. Once they have the title, however, it almost always falls into place, and they easily write the rest of the article – getting that headline, however, can take a lot of thought!

Your headline must contain your keyword or keyword phrase. It must give the reader an idea of what your article is about, and it must compel the reader to actually read the article. The headline obviously has a huge responsibility.

Because everything rests on that headline, it is a good idea for any article writer to take a copywriting course. Copywriting, of course, is used to write ads and sales letters. Even though that isn’t what you are trying to accomplish here, the information learned in those courses will help you create outstanding headlines that get your articles read by a wider audience.

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Creating your own content can be quite a challenge if you publish your own online newsletter or E-zine for the first time. It is even harder for those who don’t have a flare for writing or those who don’t know where to look for content in advance.

Don’t fret – here are a few techniques on how to get your content in advance as you prepare your E-zine.

Besides writing your own content, you can get your own unique content by doing it the quick and easy way: by organizing an interview with an expert or leader regarding the theme of your E-zine.

As a matter of fact, you can do all these for free and since all the expert needs to do is share his experiences with you over lunch or a cup of tea.

This can be easily arranged as long as you agree not to give them too much trouble or if you want to buy them lunch. (After all, you are the one writing most of the content, not the expert)

Another good method that you can use to gather all your content in advance is to get them via public domains. If you are not familiar with the term "public domain", "public domain" simply means any content that is no longer protected under US copyright law.

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Pearls carry a meaning. Historically, the glowing white orbs have been associated with the moon. With the high luster and deep color of pearls, it is no wonder that these natural gemstones have been held in such high regard for thousands of years. So giving pearl jewelry to your lady is a good idea…assuming said lady loves pearls. There are some things that you need to know about pearls, however, before you buy.

Pearls are produced in both salt and fresh water, but the difference is astounding. Usually, the salt water variety of pearls are of a better quality and are also more expensive than pearls found in fresh water; however, the choice between fresh water and salt water pearls is completely personal.

You can easily tell the difference between a fresh water and salt water pearl by its appearance. Salt water pearls are—or should be—completely round, while fresh water pearls have a lumpy, potato-like shape. Usually, fresh water pearls are described as off-round, egg, or Baroque, and come with a more affordable price tag due to this irregular shape.

Imitation pearls are a different story altogether. In most cases, a glass bead is dipped into a solution made from fish scales. This coating is thin and may eventually wear off. You can usually tell an imitation by biting on it. Fake pearls glide across your teeth, while the layers of nacre on real pearls feel gritty.

Pearls are timeless and versatile that can be worn on any point of age and occasions as they are always in fashion. From a little girl to a woman of eighty, every one is equally impressed and lured by the charm of pure pearls as it looks beautiful on every one. It is the only gem which makes women drool over it.

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In an industry where many people are fighting nail-and-tooth to earn more money in any way possible, leadership by example is indeed a rare find.

Network marketers are far more likely to tell downlines something that will make them stick around than something that will ensure their success.

This is especially true when they have heard of some new technique that theoretically could work, even though they haven't yet tested it for themselves.

This leaves you with a wide open opportunity to gain a competitive advantage: by simply embracing leadership by example, you can immediately do something almost none of your competitors—either within the company or selling for another company—will ever even think of doing.

One of the best ways to lead by example in network marketing is to setup various initiatives. For instance, one month, you could pick some specific type of advertisement and then thoroughly train every person in your downline on the advantages of using it; and the best way in which they can use it. You can then run a campaign yourself, record your results and methods, and send it to your entire downline.

Working closely with your downline will not only help them to improve how they do certain things, but it will also embolden them to stick around and to promote you to their friends, who might be on the fence, trying to decide whether or not your opportunity is legitimate.