It takes a vision, lots of determination, energy, courage and hard work to start you very own magazine. It is not for the faint hearted but once you got your own publication up and running there are numerous rewards.

One person who took the plunge is Sirrka Wolke, founder and editor of “Tribe Magazine”.

Sirrka says: ”I love success and abundance, I just didn’t want to sell-out to get it. There is no point following a path to riches if you are not able to enjoy the riches when you get there. Or the journey itself. Life doesn’t start when… It is now. So I figured I had better be doing something I love today! ”

Sounds like good advice to follow. We all should take note.

Tribe Magazine is available for free online and offline. To find out more and to get past and current editions, go to: www.tribemagazine.com.au

Here are some of the rewards you get when you have your very own publication:

• you control the content
• you can counter all the fear mongering and gloom and doom of the main stream press
• you can educate your readers so they gain knowledge to make informed decisions
• you are in a unique position to empower people
• you control the advertising that appears in your magazine, especially on the children’s pages
• you can get your own and other children/teenagers involved in writing and contributing and teach them valuable skills
• you can get direct feedback from you readers and interact with them
• you can build a community (or in Sirrka’s case a “tribe”) around your magazine
• you control the distribution of your magazine and can avoid waste

These are some of the points we covered in our interview today, if you would like to hear more, listen to the show here:

Sirrka has made a special offer to our listeners: You get 20% off your first lot of advertising in Tribe Magazine when you mention that you found Tribe Magazine through our show.

She has also a passion for children being involved in creating the magazine, so there is a special section devoted to children. Contact:

junioreditor (at) tribemagazine.com.au to find out more. (Replace (at) with @ and leave no spaces).

Tribe Magazine has a distribution of 30,000 copies and is distributed around Sydney and the Southern Highlands. It will keep growing and hopefully will go national in the not too distant future.

Sirrka is a woman of many talents and has sldo written a book “FitKid7 – 7 Simple Steps for a Fit and Healthy Child”. She also created a Cd for Children so they can go to sleep easily. (Adults love it too!). You can find both of them here: www.fitkid7.com

Sirrka also started a service where she sends an uplifting and motivating SMS to your phone on a regular basis. Interested? Go to www.tribemagazine.com.au to find out more.

Till next time

Connie

Have you ever thought that being (or becoming) organized affects nearly everything else in your life? You don’t think that getting organized is that important? Read on and find out.

Being disorganized causes all sorts of problems, many may not be obvious at first glance.
* Decreased energy levels
* Lack of time for yourself
* Lack of sleep
* Increased stress levels
* Financial strain and wasted money
* Embarrassment (forgetting birthdays, not returning borrowed items, missing important appointments)
* Ineffective multitasking
* Overwhelm
* Forgetfulness and poor memory
* Poor health
* Mental health issues
* Addictions to “drown” the problem

I am sure the list could go on. Feeling bad about yourself and not tackling the problem because it is just too huge is not going to help. Be aware that most people are not naturally organized or born organizers.

It is even more important to get organized when you are not a natural organizer. Where to start? Help is at hand.

Claire McFee is the author of a book called “Organize Your Life” and the co-creator of “Organize Your Life” e-organizers. She has created over 300 lists to help you get organised. Yes, you can print them out, tick things off with a real pen and put them into folders!

Her motto is: “The weakest pen is better than the strongest memory”. She has made a very generous offer to our readers and listeners. Check it out here – www.stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog/oyl

Listen to the full interview here:

 Remember every hour you spend in the planning phase of a project will save you 3 hours of time in the execution phase!

Visit www.stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog/oyl

Till next time

Connie

Today Charly and I discussed “Giveaways” on our radio show. Giveaways are events on the internet which you can take part in. Usually giveaways have a theme or a directed at a specific interest group. When somebody decides to organise a giveaway (a mammoth task!) they first of all need contributors or JV partners who are willing to give a product (usually downloadable) or a service free of charge.  Charly and Lenore Miller from Outrageously Healthy have just done that. They have organised the “Outrageous Health Giveaway” for anybody interested in Health and Wellbeing. Check it out here:

http://stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog/mowb 

As a “member” you can then visit the giveaway and download as many of the products as you want free of charge in return for giving your name and email address to the person who contributed the gift.

In case you have a gift you want to contribute it may not be too late, talk to Charly and Lenore here:

http://stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog/mowb-jv

Here is the link to the show:

There are really some great gifts in there, have a look and check them out.

Connie and Charly

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http://www.strechyourmindandbody.com

Today Charly and I had a talk to Shelagh Jones from the Spiritual Marketing Directory. Shelagh started out by helping small businesses getting their marketing strategy right, then she went on to coaching and helping entrepreneurs in a more wholistic way by identifying blockages that stopped them from moving on and other issues.

Over time she found that there was a lot of insincerity around the issue of internet marketing. The problem is that a lot of communities exist on the internet but they do not want any marketing to happen in their forums or other places on the internet where they “hang out” so to speak. Anyone wanting to gain access to potential customers who might be interested in their products had to pretend to be there for different reasons and it gets very frustrating, time consuming and insincere.

So Shelagh decided to create a directory and community that was purely for marketing and showcasing your business.

She also is a firm believer in the Law of Attraction – like is attracted to like.
She found that a common wish was to” find more customers who are just like me.”  People who have the same values, who think like me about how to live a life, how to run a business, how to have business interactions work out to the best advantage of all involved.

She wanted to create a place where people looking for a company in a particular industry could find out about the values of businesses, about what motivated them, before starting a business relationship with them.

Shelagh tries to make things simple for members of the directory. Once the entry is in the directory is does not have to be added to or updated all the time (unless you want to). Participation in the forum is completely voluntary but very valuable. Businesses who do not have a website established yet and find that task daunting can get themselves a domain name and point it to their page in the directory till they manage to set up their own web presence.

To find out more, listen to the whole interview here:

Shelagh has also made a very generous offer for our listeners. She will give a 2 month free subscription to the Spiritual Marketing Directory when you join the directory through the link below:

http://stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog/spiritus

To find out more about the directory you can go to:

http://www.spiritus-thespiritualmarketingdirectory.com

It is all about creating authenticity in marketing, sharing your values and being able to show who your really are.

Connie and Charly

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http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com

On our blog talk radio show this week Charly and I talked to Don Christie who is an expert in Search Engine Marketing.  We discussed a number of different things and Don is really great at explaining things in simple terms. to get the full benefit of what he had to share we recommend you listen to our interview here:

Don talked about the importance of having the right keyword phrase. Quite often this is not the phrase you think your customers are looking for but something different.

Don’t focus solely on Google to place your advertising - MSN gives you good value for money and Yahoo has its place as well.

While everyone is trying to optimise their Google ads to appear as number one of the first page in the search results, this is not necessarily as important as it seems. Ads that are displayed in position number 2-4 still get clicked on and generate a reasonable amount of sales. The added advantage is that they are less costly as well.

According to Don it is also of paramount importance to have a fully optimised landing page that really matches your ad and doesn’t send your potential customer somewhere they don’t want to go. For Google to be happy, it has to be very specific. Don gave the example of a “Red Wine” ad – it is not good enough for this ad to lead to a page of a liquor wholesaler, it has to go to a page that talks specifically about red wine, the different types, vintages etc.

Don has a special free report available on his website. it is called “Adwords Secret Strategies Report” and contains some good information. Go to http://www.donchristie.com to download it.

Connie and Charly

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http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog

What does the term keyword mean exactly? I was often pondering whether they are called “key” words because they hold the “key”, they are all important for unlocking your website for your visitors….or whether they are called key words because they are the words your potential customers type on the “key”board to find what they are looking for?

Whatever the case, they are of crucial importance to your online success. A keyword does not have to consist of a word only, it can be a phrase as well. They are entered into a search engine and then the results will appear on the computer screen. The results are links to web pages and to ads (Adwords ads). Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this little video and thought you might enjoy it:

Let us know what you think.

Till next time,

Connie and Charly

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http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com

With lots of new websites and blogs springing up virtually every minute it becomes more and more important to make your online presence unique.  Of course your website needs to have a professional look and feel about it.  It needs to  function well and it should be easy to navigate.

One thing you want to avoid on your website is boredom.

It seems obvious but there is nothing more off putting than a boring website – have a look around and find the ones that simply don’t appeal to you, the ones that bore you, the ones you don’t bother reading any further.  It might be different for each individual but in general boredom is generated by a number of things:

• too much text that is poorly formatted and monotonous. People are so stressed out and time poor that they don’t want to read a lot – at least initially. Once you grabbed their attention and they know that you offer worthwhile material they will be willing to read more because they know that you will not be wasting their time
• lack of images or photos (remember the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words)
• the text is not broken up into manageable “chunks”, lacks sub headings and maybe a splash of colour
• the same old format all the time – think about putting up an audio or a video instead of written text, people have different ways of absorbing information, intersperse the written word with other mediums
• bad colour choices – this will of course depend a lot on your target market.  Any colour has its place but make sure they harmonise as a whole (you can use a “colourwheel” to help you determine which colours match – there is a fascinating site you may want to check out: http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html)
• to learn more about colour combinations you may want to go here: http://www.zest-it.com/colour.htm
• print that is too small or hard to read (like white on black background)
• remember: less is more
• think “google” – white background, black print,  a splash of happy, clean primary colours, the occasional picture or symbol for special occasions….I am not advocating thay your site becomes a google “clone”…but I believe that part of its success is the simplicity of its design, the primary colours and the lack of clutter on the page

I hope that this has given you some food for thought when designing or redesigning your web page.

Till next time

Connie and Charly

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http://stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog

Today, Charly and I discussed more marketing strategies for offline businesses. We talked about Pay Per Click Ads and spoke about affiliate marketing, Twitter and the importance of having a blog attached to your website.

Blogs do much more than deliver good quality information to your prospects and customers. They can help you to be perceived as  an expert in your field. They help convert prospects into buyers as they establish trust and offline businesses that have a blog attached to their website can charge premium fees, as people are willing to pay more for a service delivered by somebody who they perceive as an expert.

To find out more about affiliate marketing listen to our show and have a look at Charly’s Squidoo lens here:

http://www.squidoo.com/affiliatequeen

Here is our show:

Till next time

Connie and Charly

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http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com

On our blogtalk radio show last week and this week Charly and I were discussing some information from a seminar I attended a few weeks ago. The seminar was about winning customers during the recession. The room was packed with small business owners and nearly all of them had “bricks and mortar” businesses and a few had home based businesses. More than half the people in the room had no web presence.

The speaker started out by talking about what is different during a recession and which things are to the advantage of small business. Advertising space is being sold off cheaper as even large companies cut their advertising budgets. Some premium spots or particular types of advertising which normally are prohibitively expensive might be within reach now.

We also talked about website essentials, what things to add to your site to gain prospects’ trust, why analysis is important, ways of analysing what happens on your site and a number of other things. Listen to our shows to find out about long tail keywords, links and link building, pay per click advertising and more!

Listen to our full shows here:

Connie and Charly

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http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog