oct 24 newsletter Have you ever noticed some of the patterns of the so-called Internet marketing guru's? They collect together in their closed "club" of buddies, hyping and promoting one another's latest products. It's a strategy that some of them have written ebooks about: Joint Ventures. Now of course, everyone would love to have the endorsement of a top named person in their field of work.  It adds a certain credibility (if the endorser is credible) and makes you stop and think "well, if he likes it, it must be good". At least on the surface it appears that way. In reality, those endorsements are often purchased.  Not with cash up, front mind you. Nope.  Those endorsements or testimonials are purchased on the back end, as a percentage of sales revenue. So they sell you ebooks and subscription services on how to do Joint Ventures (or any of the other myriad of marketing programs), meanwhile always refusing to endorse your particular deal. We know this:  we've had it happen. Meanwhile, there are those of us who just keep cranking away, building our subscribers, giving them great insiders tips and advice and build our credibility on the strength of honesty and helpful work. By the way, Dave and I don't position ourselves as Internet marketers or guru's.  Of course, we are "doing" marketing, but marketing is not our core offering. Technology, tools, strategy and implementation are the areas we specialize in. Dave and Skip =========== Growing Your Business One of the most difficult challenges we all have is getting qualified leads and traffic for our business. Regardless of what type of business you have, your choices to drive new prospects to it is limited and many of those choices can be very expensive. One of the lowest cost methods of customer acquisition, regardless of whether your business is 100% online or brick and mortar, is word of mouth advertising. Actually, word of mouth is not advertising at all.  You cannot force someone to promote your business.  And generally speaking, you cannot 'buy' someone's referral. People either refer your business to their friends, family and colleagues, or they don't. This type of promotion (advertising) simply cannot be purchased (unlike our story in the opening segment). It is low cost, it is viral and it is highly effective. But how do you get people talking about your business?  How do you get them to WANT to promote and refer your business or company? We recently came across the book Word Of Mouth Magic and picked up a copy of it.  The topic fascinates us and if you decide to check this out, you'll be stunned as well. What Martin teaches us are the key steps and methods needed to create the conditions for your customers to promote your business. He tells some amazing case studies of a Dentist and an Accountant and lays out in clear terms what and how they created such an avalanche of referrals, they cut back their work hours and increased prices and profits at the same time. Martin has a free ezine you can check out before you consider buying it.  You may want to give it a try: http://www.instant-web-site-tools.com/word-mouth.html =========== Your Computer Do you use Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later? If so, and you are unaware of this, you might want to check out a little company that Microsoft acquired a few months ago because they couldn't afford to have this technology in the hands of a competitor. It's called LookOut and it's a high speed (and we mean blaaazing fast) search tool for your local computer: http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/ Currently, it is a free add-on, but you can expect it to show up in future Microsoft Office desktop offerings. This little baby indexes every and any type and kind of file, document and email that exists on your PC.  By typing an key phrase entry into it's little box, in under 2 seconds it returns a list of all files containing those search terms. It's a pretty amazing little utility that has already saved Skip's hyde in a few instances! Enjoy.