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The book has been out for about a year, but I finally got around to reading Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter-and checking it off of my reading list. If you have an hour to spare, this book is small and can easily be read over a lunch break or before going to bed. I found the story very entertaining, easy to read, and quite enjoyable.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a fable about a colony of emperor penguins that has lived on an ice berg in Antartica for as long as they can remember. Fred, the main character, is very curious and has a keen sense of observation and notices over a period of time that the only home that they know could be in danger of breaking apart. The story chronicles Fred’s challenges as he tries to convey his information initially to the penguin council and then to the entire colony. Fred runs into roadblock along the way, but logically navigates them, ultimately convincing the colony to change its way of thinking, resulting in them changing their way of life for the better by never being complacent and always being prepared to adapt to new situations. I highly recommend this quick read by Kotter. I have included the eight step of change below…

The Eight Step Process of Successful Change:

Set the Stage
1. Create a Sense of Urgency
Help others see the need for the change and the importance of acting immediately.

2. Pull Together the Guiding Team
Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change-one with leadership skills, credibility, communications ability, authority, analytical skills, and a sense of urgency.

Decide What to Do
3. Develop the Change Vision and Strategy.

Make it Happen
4. Communicate for Understanding and Buy In.
Make sure as many others as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.

5. Empower Others to Act
Remove as many barriers as possible so that those who want to make the vision a reality can do so.

6. Produce Short-Term Wins.
Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible.

7. Don’t Let Up.
Press harder and faster after the first successes. Be relentless with initiating change after change until the vision is a reality.

Make it Stick
8. Create a New Culture.

Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become strong enough to replace old traditions.

Tags: John Kotter, Our Iceberg Is Melting

The time is almost near folks.  The Nintendo Wii Fit will be released on May 21, 2008 on Wii Fit and is selling for $89.99.  The release day for Europe is April, 25, 2008 (TODAY!).  You can go to Amazon and pre-order yours today.  I plan to order mine in the next day or two.  The Nintendo Wii Fit sold over 1.3 million units in January and is still the hottest seller.

Amazon.com Product Features:

• Lean to block soccer balls, swivel hips to power hoop twirls or balance to hold the perfect yoga pose. As you stand on the Wii Balance Board, included with Wii Fit, your body’s overall balance is tied to the game in a way you’ve never experienced before.
• Wii Fit also uses the Wii Balance Board for daily tests. These evaluate two key measures that a household can track via progress charts -
  Body Mass Index (BMI) - A weight evaluation based on a ratio of weight to height.
• Wii Fit Age - The Wii Fit Age is measured by factoring the user’s BMI reading, testing the user’s center of gravity and conducting quick balance tests
• Wii Fit includes more than 40 types of training activities designed to appeal to all members of a household. Training falls into four fitness categories.

I am sure the Nintendo Wii Fit availability will be similar to the Wii when it first came out, with no one could get one in a decent time period.  I am ordering my Wii Fit tomorrow so I won’t get left calling all over town trying to scrape one up.

Tags: Nintendo Wii, Wii Fit

Just as the headline says, free keyword research tools can potentially make you a lot of money. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator are two free tools that form an awesome combination to increasing your bottom line.

The SEO Toolbook Keyword Suggestion Tool is powered by WordTracker. All you do is type in a keyword into the text field and click the Submit button and your keyword list comes back in a few seconds. The free keyword tool from WordTracker is good, but it only gives you two columns of the top 100 keywords, one column for keyword search volume, and the other column for the keyword. The SEO Toolbook Keyword Suggestion takes those 100 top keywords from WordTracker and adds a lot more value to the consumer.

I am just amazed ad the amount of information that they give on each keyword. One important feature is the “Export to CSV” hyper link in the upper-left corner of your keyword list. Click that link and you can save the keyword list to your desktop to open in Microsoft Excel. Once the file is open, you will see three columns that are labeled “Exact Match”, “Phrase Match”, and “Broad Match”.

Here is where the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator comes into play. Copy each one of the previously mentioned columns one at a time into the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator keyword field, making sure you only have one keyword per line. In section C of the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator, click on “All Countries and Territories” and then click the Add button to the immediate right, effectively adding the selected item into the “Selected Countries and/or Territories” text field. Now, click the Continue button on the bottom of the page to go to the Traffic Estimator page.

The Traffic Estimator page has some valuable information on it, in particular the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column. Click this column heading hyperlink to sort in descending order, making the down arrow appear. You should now be seeing the estimated average cost per click for each keyword that you could expect to pay if you were advertising in Google AdWords. On the flip side of Google AdWords is Google AdSense.

According to Google, AdSense offers contextual advertising solution to web publishers, delivering ads that are relevant to the content pages on a website. By knowing how much the cost-per-click ranges are, you can target only the high paying AdSense keywords by creating articles for your website or blog. For example, I searched for “Insurance” in the SEO Toolbook Keyword Suggestion Tool and copied the three sets of keywords into the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator. I sorted the keyword list in descending order by clicking the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column. The top 6 keywords are as follows:

Keyword Estimated Avg. CPC
=====================================
[auto insurance quotes] $28.61 - $38.50
[insurance quote] $28.23 - $36.19
auto insurance quotes $27.67 - $35.55
“auto insurance quotes” $27.63 - $35.56
[insurance quotes] $27.18 - $40.77
“auto insurance” $26.04 - $34.13

(Note: These keywords were copied from Google AdWords Traffic Estimator on 4/2/2008)

Wow! Someone is actually paying anywhere between $26.04 and $40.77 in AdWords to advertise with those keywords. Just imagine how much you would get if someone clicked on an AdSense ad that was displayed in one of your articles on “Insurance”. The really amazing thing is that you can pay a writer on E-Lance around $6 to $10 dollars per article, freeing up your valuable time for more important things, like using this method to find even more expensive keywords.

As you can see, using the free keyword research tools, you can get an idea about just how important picking the right keywords in both AdWords and AdScense can make to your bottom line and how much you make. I hope this little technique helps you find high-paying keyword to target for writing articles. Let me know your findings so I can share with others.

Free Keyword Tool Links:

SEO Toolbook: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
Google AdWords Traffic Estimator: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

If you are an AdWords user, also check the free Super Affiliate Helper at http://williamjones.info/super_affiliate_helper/

Hey all you PPC marketers out there. I quickly put together a little tool that I am calling the Super Affiliate Helper. It is based off of Amit Mehta’s multiplier methodology that he teaches in the Super Affiliate Coaching program. Please take a look at the Super Affiliate Helper if you use the AdWords Editor.

Features:

• Greatly minimize the work you do in Excel with Amit Mehta’s multiplier methodology in the Super Affiliate Coaching program.
• Specify a campaign name.
• Copy-and-paste an existing keyword list that contains one keyword per line.
• Automatically removes duplicate keywords and sorts keywords list.
• Automatically creates keyword list, ad groups, and ads that are properly formatted to copy into Google’s AdWords Editor.
• Automatically swap ad headlines greater than 25 characters (Google) with a shorter one.
• Creates broad, phrase, and exact matches for each keyword.
• Creates one keyword per ad group.
• Each word of the ad is capitalized.
• Sets default bids for ad group to .10 and status to ‘Active’ (or change these options in Excel or AdWords Editor).

Check out screen cast page that demonstrates one of many methods for getting keywords, and then shows how to copy those keywords from the Super Affiliate Helper into the AdWords Editor.

Check out the Super Affiliate Helper!

I welcome any comments, feedback, bugs, and any and all donations.

I was recently asked to describe the hardest ethical dilemma that I was ever faced with. This was the story that I told them.

I was working for a major electronics retail store about ten years ago. During this time, I was going to school and working full-time. While working one evening, witnessed something that brought me face-to-face with and ethical dilemma. I had witnessed a friend take some money from the store’s bank deposit bag. To understand why it was a dilemma for me, I need to start this short story at the beginning.

At the time, I worked with two other coworkers and a manager at the electronics store. The store was a low volume location and did not warrant having more then four people employed there. My coworkers and I became close since there were so few of us. Soon we started getting together after work for activities and soon became a pretty regular routine. All of this transpired over a year, and while we hung out together, we all had only a working relationship with the store manager.

I will call my coworker Joe. One night when Joe and I were closing the store, I heard his cell phone ring. It was his wife and she did not have good news for him. Joe looked upset and worried and went to the back of the store to the office and talked to his wife while all the while he was pacing back and fourth. They talked for a few minutes and he was shaking his head. I only heard him say that he would take care of it and then he hung up his phone. He came back up to the front and asked if he could borrow two hundred dollars from me until tomorrow afternoon. I told him that I only had fifty that I could spare or I would have given him the money. I asked him what he needed the money for and he told me that his baby had some condition and needed to take a certain medicine three times a day. His wife called him to let him know that she just realized that the medicine had just ran out. The baby would go into seizures if it did not get the medicine on time. His wife did not have a car or a job and could not get in touch with her parents. They needed to get the medicine fast. He asked me if I could close up the store while he went to get the medicine and I agreed. I saw him walk to the back office and pick up his coat. He paused at the manager’s desk and picked up the money back for the nightly deposit. He opened the bag, took some money, and closed the bag. As he turned to come toward the front of the store, I looked away and acted as if I was adjusting some product on the shelf. We said good night and he left the store.

I saw Joe take the money; I knew why he took it; And, the manager said to inform him of any suspicious activity or theft. Joe had to do something quickly for his baby, or possibly risk the baby’s life or serious injury. He knew the rules and knew he would get in trouble for his actions if the store’s money were not deposited. Joe would have the money tomorrow afternoon but needed it now. Joe knew that there was a chance that the manager would come in later and not check the deposit, and if that happened, he could put the money back before anyone knew anything. I also knew everything that Joe knew. After taking everything into consideration, I chose to do nothing. I would look the other way and let the natural order of events unfold. I would not get into any trouble since it was Joe who was in charge of depositing the money. If I told the manager I would betray a friend. If someone stole something from the store, I needed to inform the manager. I chose not to inform the manager, because if I were in the exact same position I probably would have done the same thing.

As fate would have it, the manager came in early the next day and I could see that he had checked on the deposit. He did not mention anything to me. When Joe came in the manager called him to the office. They stayed there for nearly an hour with the door shut. Joe opened the door and walked up to me. He said that it has been nice working here and that he would be looking for another job. I asked him what happened and he told me that he took some money from the deposit bag for his baby’s medicine and that the manager found out before he could replace it. He had the money to replace what was taken and gave it to the manager. He also told the manager his story of why he had taken the money and the manager said that he understood. The manager would allow him to quit and would give him a recommendation letter if he needed one. The manager stated that he had to still enforce store policy regardless of the situation. In the end, everything worked out better for Joe. The letter of recommendation from the store manager landed Joe a higher paying job. With his increased earnings, Joe started a savings account and always kept extra medicine on hand. If I were to go back in time, I would not do anything differently.