Product Camp Austin 2009, photo by BWhichard

I spoke at Product Camp here in Austin on Saturday.  If you follow me on Twitter (@EagleChris) you saw that I streamed video during some of it. Wifi was very busy with 400+ people tweeting and blogging so at times it didn’t work for me.

I gave a presentation of Twitter For Small Business.  The biggest question was why small businesses should even use twitter. Many feel it’s a big waste of time.

I spend about 30 minutes a day on Twitter.  I use it as a one front end to my marketing funnel.  I don’t make any money directly with Twitter and I don’t know anybody that does. It’s a front end to get people to know you. They then get on a call or webinar you are doing. Or your blog RSS or newletter.  They get to know you more and some of them with buy a product from you.  Twitter is just a create front end and I choose to invest some everyday on it because of the phenomenal growth in social media.  I also enjoy social media. To me it’s a cocktail party where I get to meet a lot of interesting people. Some will get to know me better and some of them will buy my products, but my attitude is to have fun and give out interesting information.  I summed up my social media philosophy at TwitterForSmallBusiness.com in a free report.

The presentation by Jonas Lamis on how he uses Google Adwords to test a business idea was received well. I’m been doing this technique for years and you do really learn quick whether your idea has a market very fast, like a day. Jonas make a great point that this is good for discovery but it’s enough for deep analysis. And nothing happens until you start selling something. That is the real proof.

At another session I learned why link building is still a lot of work.  Check out hubspot.com and buzzstream.com.  I just ran the website grader from hubspot.com on this website and got a great score of 97.9 out of 100. I’m very happy with that.

I’ll be back at the next Product Camp.  Check your local area if they have a product camp near you. It’s great to have a group come together and brainstorm together.

My Product Camp 09 Experience is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

That is where someone makes the same website with the same content using different URLs over and over and then sells them.

It’s sounds great.  It’s sounds like a viable idea. But, it isn’t.

The problem with having the same membership website is well they are the same. The squeeze page is the same, all the copy is the same, everything is the same. And Google hates things that are the same.

They are essentially selling a website that Google isn’t going to want to index. So you have to rely entirely on marketing it without Google. Hey that’s possible. You can grow your email list, post articles, send out press releases and work yourself into the ground.

Your audience gravitate to your because of you. You have to be you. You can’t buy a pre-made website and be you. Branding 101.

The real key is help in marketing. Having the same website as a lot of other people is going to hurt you.

I don’t think these pre made membership websites will last.  Just the latest fad of Internet Marketers. They will sell it for now and when it doesn’t sell anymore they come out with the next latest thing.

To be consistent on the Internet you can’t rely on the latest fads. You’ll be switching from one fad to another and get extremely tired, divorced, single and stressed.  It’s not good.

You need to work on your marketing funnel. Work on your front end products, get a video squeeze page up and market that, take those profits and make your membership website and add some products in between as up and downsells.

Do you want a membership website with YOUR content on it where you can add and edit all the content yourself. Where you can manage all the members yourself without having to learn a complicated membership application that only techies know how to use?

Money Machine Membership Website

Pre-Made Membership Websites Suck is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

The soft launch is actually a lot more common.

Restaurants entreprenuers start with getting their family and friends trying out their food and tweek it until it is good enough to launch their restaurant.

Comics try new material in front of small crowds to gauge response before taking it to TV or big arena.  Authors test in blog and magazines before moving on to publishing a book.

A lot of Internet Markets do it too. They keep selling their main e-book or course, the ones with broad appeal.

The soft launch is smart because you’ll never be able to plan for everything that will come up.  You can’t think of 100% of what will happen.  It’s much easier to work through the challenges.  Solve them as they come up.  Definitely have a plan but be realistic that you can’t plan for everything. You’ll waste a lot of time trying which you can use to actually implement. That extra planning is a waste of time so don’t do it.  Create a simple plan and implement it and adjust as things come up.

Soft launching gives you the ability to tweak and change things. You get it out there and gauge interest and adjust as necessary.  Successful products are produced by how good you are in tweaking it after you’ve launched it.

Make mistakes in front of small audiences and you’ll learn what works and then you move on to bigger audiences.

I see so many people not doing anything because they look up to big Internet Marketers and try to do what they are doing.  They didn’t start big, they went through a process to get big.  You do to.

Take the first step.

Why The Soft Launch is Smart is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

I use Google Alerts and Tweet Later to monitor my name, company name and brands.  And Qwitter to track people who quit following me on Twitter.

A vast majority of the the time these tools find good uses of your name, etc.  Which you can blog about.  Rarely they find content isn’t so nice.  You can respond in comments if it is a blog or by twitter with a @reply.  Of course sometimes it’s best to ignore but these tools will help you monitor your good name and give you the option of resonding.

Any other tools that help with this let us know in the comments.

How to monitor your name on the Internet is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

Image via CrunchBase

My favorite to do manager Remember The Milk now has a Gmail gadget which allows you to manage your tasks in Gmail.

• Review your upcoming tasks for the week
• Add new tasks and edit existing ones
• Easily complete and postpone tasks
• Review your overdue tasks
• Optionally show tasks with no due date
• Display tasks from a particular list or Smart List
• With the “quick add” feature, you can easily add tasks and optionally include a due date and/or tag

Remember The Milk – Services / Remember The Milk for Gmail / Gadget.

To Do Gmail Gadget is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

Image via Wikipedia

I use FireFox as my web browser because of the plugins.  Here are my favorite productive plugins.  Followed by some new ones I’m trying and not sure about yet.

Current Favorites:

• Update Notifier – Notifies you when updates are available for your extensions and themes. Allows quick access to your extensions and themes and the ability to check both types for any updates. Easily configurable for automatically installing updates when available and checking for updates when Firefox starts.
• GTDInbox – GTDInbox (formerly GTDGmail) transforms Gmail into a powerhouse of productivity and manageability. It gives you a faster, more task-orientated, better inbox.
• Del.icio.us bookmarks – Delicious Bookmarks is the official Firefox add-on for Delicious, the world’s leading social bookmarking service (formerly del.icio.us). It integrates your bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access.
• FaviconizeTab – This extension adds a new “FaviconizeTab” option to the context menu of the tab…
• Google Gears – Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser: Desktop – Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop, Database – Store data locally in a fully-searchable database, WorkerPool – Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
• Google Toolbar for Firefox – Take the power of Google with you anywhere on the Web
• IE Tab – IE Tab – an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.
• ShowIP – Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.
• Skype extension for Firefox – When you installed Skype, you also installed the Skype extension for Firefox. The extension turns phone numbers on websites into buttons which you can click to call from Skype.
• Sxipper – Forget your passwords! Sxipper accurately fills in forms, manages passwords and your OpenIDs.
• Tabs Open Relative – Tabs Open Relative makes all new tabs open to the right of the current tab, rather than at the far right of the tab bar.
• Copy Plain Text – Copies text without formatting…
• Download Statusbar – View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.
• DownThemAll! – The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!
• Tabbrowser Preferences – Enables enhanced control for some aspects of tabbed.
• Alexa Toolbar – Shows your traffic rank for any website you are on including your own.
• Better Flickr – Enhance Flickr with a compilation of useful Greasemonkey scripts.
• Better GCal – Adds collapsible header and sidebar, event title text wrap, colored weekend days, week numbers, and skins to Google Calendar.
• Better GReader – Preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, get a Mac OS X like skin, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader.
• ShareThis – ShareThis makes it easier and more efficient then ever before to share any type of content you wish with anyone you care to share with. With mashed up online address books and posting to MySpace and Facebook plus a free Sharebox for archiving things you shared ShareThis helps you sharify the web
• BugMeNot – Bypass compulsory web registration with the context menu via www.bugmenot.com.
• Evernote Web Clipper – Provides a button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to Evernote. Works on Windows, Mac & Linux.

New plugins I’m trying out still:

• PayPal Plug-In for Firefox – Take PayPal every where on the Internet
• ScribeFire – ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
• Shareaholic – Shareaholic allows you to quickly share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a very wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking & bookmarking sites – such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Google Reader, MySpace, and StumbleUpon, without cluttering up your browser.
• TrackMeNot – Protects users against search data profiling.
• TwitterBar – Post to Twitter from your address bar.
• Zemanta – Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags in every popular blogging dashboard will make your blogging fun again.

Enjoy these plugins, they add a lot of functionality to Firefox.

What are your favorite productive Firefox plugins?  Share them in the comments.

Productive Firefox Plugins is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

But, traveling with books is hard.  There is just only room for one or two books in my luggage.  I don’t want to travel with more than two bags.  Did three last summer and my partner had three herself.  Six bags while transferring from one train to another is not fun.  In Paris we could get a porter to help us but outside London not a person in sight.

So I don’t travel with more than a book.  But, I have a bunch of ebooks and audiobooks.  I love ebooks.  I’ve even scanned an old book in as an ebook.  I think when the Amazon Kindle comes down in price it will become mainstream but I think that is some years away.

In the meantime, you can store your ebooks (pdf files) now in Google Docs.  A new feature that just came out.  Been a long time coming but it is here.  I’ve been uploading my favorite ebooks by Joe Vitale and Mark Joyner and some new ones I haven’t read yet up.  It is fantastic, try it out.

Traveling with books is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.

It’s amazing and I wanted to share it with everyone.

1-800-GOOG-411: Find and connect with local businesses for free from your phone.

1-800-GOOG-411 is a post from: Abundance Unlimited
Check out Christopher's book Play Prosperity Games. Learn how to create new business ideas based on what you love.