Tips have a Fast Internet Connection

Road Runner is a division of Time Warner Inc providing internet service through cable most notably through the Time Warner Cable. It is an Internet Service Provider providing the service over DOCSIS compatible cable modems. Road Runner provides service across the United States. The companies which are offering Road Runner are Time Warner Cable, Insight Communications, Urban Cable Works, Bright House Networks and America Online. 

Offer: Road Runner offers a super fast Internet connection through cable. Road Runner provides a constant online connection, hence there is no need for dialing or any question of disconnecting from the internet. Also a great flexibility is available to the customer in the choice of the connection as there are no long term contracts or obligations to be signed. 

Availability: Road Runner is available in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. However to confirm whether it is available in your street, you have to visit the website and enter your address. The website informs about the availability. 

Features: Road Runner provides the modem, installation, tools and a good customer support. The extras include multiple email accounts, personal home page space, instant messaging, dial access/web mail etc. The speed is up to 8 Mbps (Mega bits per second). At this speed you can easily share or download movies, songs etc from the internet. Road Runner is also giving a 30 day money back guarantee in case you are not satisfied with their service. 

Hardware: Hardware consists of a splitter to split the coaxial cable cord and one output goes to your TV and the other goes to the modem. From the modem the output goes to your computer. Your computer should have a USB port or an Ethernet card for connection. The modem also needs a power point.

Obtaining Road Runner: This is fairly simple. First go to the website and check availability at your place. The website will return various services available. Next choose the service of your liking. The modem and installation will be done by the company. If you want to save some money, you can obtain the installation kit from the Road Runner local representative and install the modem yourself. 

Price: The average offer is around $45 a month with installation charges extra. Presently Road Runner is offering a $30 per month offer till September 06.

Steady Flow of Content Blog

The Internet is full of Saturday Morning Bloggers. These bloggers ignore their blogs all week, then they post a few dozen articles in their blog and then spend a few hours adding comments to other blogs. This is a great way to spend a Saturday, but it provides very little SEO marketing benefits. 

Search engines need a steady flow of comments. Most blogs that appear in a web search have a post that has been published within the last few hours. Dozens of blog search engines operate for the sole purpose of alerting the big five search engines of new content. The posts that you publish on Saturday are already out of the lists by Sunday afternoon. That is why it is important to provide the search engines with fresh content daily.

A steady stream of content is so important that some blog software programs have a delayed publishing plug-in. This lets the blogger upload multiple articles at one time, but it waits until a pre-determined time to publish each one. This is a great idea, but it is only half the solution.

The blog search engines must be pinged shortly after the blog is posted. There are several good pinging services on the web. Most of them ping a few dozen blog search engines, telling them that your blog has new content. 

This confuses most bloggers. They believe that tagging an article with a blog search engine like Technorati or Del.icio.us is all they need to do. Tagging is a method of introducing a list of your articles to potential readers. Tagging has nothing to do with building in-bound links or a web pages rank. Tagging is for peoples benefits. Pinging is for the benefit of search engines. 

Publishing one blog a day and then pinging the blog search engines will ensure that the big five search engines never forget your blog. www.weblogs.com gives a visual of how blog pinging works. Each of the blog posts that appear on the page have pinged the blog search engines. 

An overly simplified method of explaining pinging is by comparing it to crawling a webpage. Instead of waiting for a robot to crawl the blog, ping the search engine while the news is still fresh. 

Another excellent strategy is to invite your reader to leave a comment. Comments are picked up by search engines as new content. The only problem with allowing comments it the potential from comment spam.

Strategies For Successful Business Networking

There are a variety of organizations that run networking groups across the country. The largest group is probably BNI, which offers members the chance to attend weekly meetings and develop new professional relationships to help them grow their business. some chambers of commerce are now organizing "leads groups" for their members as well. These groups are intended to offer members a way to connect with each other and potentially refer each other business. 

In most "leads groups" each group allows no more then one representative from any industry, so if the group has a mortgage broker other mortgage brokers have to join another group or wait for the seat to open up. The idea is that by restricting membership, you eliminate competition within the group.

The agenda at most structured networking meetings is pretty straightforward. Each member is given an opportunity to introduce themselves, then there is a short presentation by one or two members (each member gets the chance eventually). The meeting ends with members discussing potential referrals for each other. This means that most of the members get about one minute to present who they are and teach the other members of the group how to refer to them.

Most people do a great job of presenting themselves. However, most people do not think to ask for referrals. At most networking events, you are not expected to ask for a referral or explain what a good referral for you is. However, at a leads group it is not only acceptable, it is expected!

I am involved in a number of networking groups and have used the simple outline below to create my elevator pitch (quick introduction). When I deliver my elevator pitch to a leads group, my goal is to educate everyone in the room about my company and what I do, as well as to teach them the best way to refer others to me. In addition, I want to make sure I actually ask for a specific referral. I will go through each piece of the outline in detail, but here are the basics.

* Introduction 
o Name
o Position + company name
o Location of the company
o Overview of services
* Tell a story
* Call to action



The introduction piece of your presentation should stay the same every time you give it. You might say something like, "My name is Joe Smith. I am mortgage broker at ABC mortgages in Anytown, USA. We offer a full line of residential and commercial mortgage products." You can add some additional detail, but you should really focus on keeping this short and on point.

At each meeting, you will have the chance to differentiate yourself from the competition by telling a short story during your presentation. The story can be related to a specific challenge you helped a client overcome, a unique feature of your product or service, or you can simply talk about a new development at your company. Consider writing out your stories in advance so you know what you are going to say at each meeting. In addition, you can schedule the content so that the other members of your group learn more and more about you at each meeting. You need to focus on educating your group a little more each week.

The "call to action" is very important and the piece that most people overlook. You need to tell the other members of your group exactly what type of referral you are looking for. For example, our mortgage broker, Joe Smith, might say, "Today a good referral for me would be a Realtor at XYZ real estate company." Joe may also say, "Today a good referral for me would be anyone who purchased their home more then 10 years ago."

I alway recommend that your "call to action" is as specific as possible. If Joe stands up and says that a good referral would be anyone who needs a mortgage, the rest of the group will have a harder time thinking of people to refer. If Joe asks for an introduction to a specific person at a specific company, someone in the group may know that person or know someone at that company who can facilitate Joe's introduction. The more specific the request, the more likely it is to trigger someone else in the group's memory.

A last minute hint:

Keep focused on the networks of the people in the group, not on the people themselves. In other words, when you are participating in a networking or leads group, you should not focus on gaining the business of the people at the table. Instead, you should focus on gaining their trust so that they will refer you people in their network.

Home Businesses Setting Up

Setting up a work from home business operation requires some careful thought and preparation to ensure success. In this article we will review some of the less traditional considerations that may apply to you for your business.

Whether you are working from home for your employer or you are working from home and starting your own business, the topics discussed in this short article will almost certainly apply. Many people dream of being able to work from home for the flexibility that it provides and the decreased stress. One of the myths that we should dispel immediately is that people working at home work less hours. In fact it could not be further from the truth. The reality is that the majority of people spend more hours working from their homes simply because the tools they need are available within a few short steps.

Having covered this basic myth, what are some of the considerations you want to take into account regarding setting up and running a work from home business? Your business type will dictate which issues that affect you, however we will list as many as possible in the following paragraphs for you to think about.

The obvious items are work space, power, communications both data and voice, tools that you may need and space to store raw materials, finished goods as well as your equipment that you may need. This includes of course even your computers if you are involved in some form of online Internet business.

Additionally, you will want to ensure that you routinely back up all of your computer data, which includes customer data as well as product designs etc. Storing this information off site is a good idea to avoid loss due to theft or fire. It is easy to replace damage or stolen equipment, however your data is a totally different matter.

Many cities and towns have local bylaws that manage what type of businesses can be operated out of your home. Everything from parking for customers and employees, to noise management are a consideration. If you are running an online internet business, you may not be concerned about bylaws, however having sufficient bandwidth to handle the data transfer rates can be a limiting factor.

Family is another consideration. Temporarily taking over the living room for a week or two is often ok, however permanent residence of your business in space that your family considers part of the normal living area is eventually going to cause strife and stress for any business owner. These considerations are just a few of the issues business owners need to consider in addition to the more traditional items such as business plans, funding, production and customer support.

How to Build a Traffic Highway

Every internet business needs traffic and lots of it. Traffic is the lifeblood of online businesses, therefore, any program you under-take to build a successful company or business online must incorporate numerous traffic generating strategies.

Assuming that you now have excellent products or service to market and all other internal plans well in place, now is the time to get down to real business of directing targeted traffic to your website. 

The following tips are designed with you in mind to help creating the website traffic that is so essential to sales and profits online. Advertising is the key to internet marketing and search engine traffic will be the backbone or the main source for that continuous flow.

Yahoo/Overture and Google Adwords are excellent paid advertising to build traffic. It is unlikely that you will get the required website traffic without utilizing some of these paid advertising services, Overture and Yahoo, being so popular, it is futile not to avail yourself of their services. 

Search engine advertising has brought real success to thousands of online businesses, why not yours? PPC or (Pay Per Click) is the term given to this way of advertising. With proper keyword selection related to your products or services this advertising method could be just what you need.

Another traffic building tool is to exchange website links with other businesses, this is called reciprocal linking and both parties normally benefit from this exchange of links related in some way to the business. When sites link to each other, they both share in the traffic generated by the efforts of each other. The more reciprocal links exchanged the more traffic that could be generated.

Viral Marketing: 

This is a free or inexpensive way to spread the word on the internet about your company, business, product or service. This could be perceived as a sneaky way to advertise, by attaching your company name, product or link to certain media such as a funny video, entertaining games, interesting articles or gossip. People who are attracted to this kind of creative entertainment will pass it on to friends, relatives and acquaintances thus spreading the word wide and far.

Optimizing your website content for high ranking 

Search engines rank your site based on well placed keywords and keyword phrases in your site content. Therefore the content on your site should be well optimized to take advantage of this requirement to rank high in search engine results. So, be warned when you write the content for your site.

Write and publish Articles about your business.

Submit your articles to article directories and publishers since they will have a large circulation of sites that will read and distribute the articles, giving you the exposure needed to generate much traffic. Write about special features of your business, product or service. Also include a resource box with your sites description and services plus a link to your website at the end of the article. 

Become members of forums and online communities:
As members of these communities, you can write and post helpful articles along with a signature file with links to your business. This builds your credibility online, while creating much needed one way links to your site. This could boost your website ranking and traffic substantially.

Finally, publish a newsletter, as a credible and trusted net marketer, your readers will share this with many others thus creating loyal repeat visitors to your site and you will be able to market to this list forever. This list of traffic building tools is by no means final, with some imagination and creativity more ways can be found to add to these marketing strategies on and off line.