When they’re reading the paper – what’s in it for me? When they’re watching TV – what’s in it for me? When they’re doing their shopping – what’s in it for me?

Once you understand this very simple fact of life everything else falls into place. Well, nearly everything, because there are some things in life we just won’t get, of course.

So when you approach someone to try and interest them in something, or you write something to persuade people to do something, like buy your product, they’ll be thinking – What’s in it for me?

Philip Gegan

Can you think of anything you wish you’d known when you were 18? Or even a bit older, going into your 20s? Of course you can. We all can. To have a wise head on such young shoulders would have been a tremendous advantage . . .

Like most young men of that age, one of the foremost topics on my mind was girls. And when I think back to some of the occasions when I messed up with a girlfriend, and the way it happened, I still cringe in embarrassment. If only I had known then what I know now.

I don’t want to sound like someone who thinks they know it all, because I don’t. Not by a long way. But I’m pretty sure I know a damn sight more now than I knew then. [And so you should, you've been around long enough. - Annon.]

Perhaps the main thing I wish I’d known back then is this. Girls aren’t generally interested in being made to feel that their boyfriend is the most fantastic boy in the world. They’re interested in being made to feel that they are the most fantastic girl in the world.

There must be thousands of other things, but that’s one that came off the top of my head. Let’s hear from anyone with a contribution to make to this question – What do you wish you’d known when you were 18? Or even 20?

Philip Gegan

At least, I suppose they are, because it’s no good being just the same as everyone else. But the problem is that most people try to be different in the same way, so they’re not that different after all.

Type any search phrase you like into a search engine and go to any of the pages listed. How many of them will be really different, really unique? Web templates and blogs tend to make for a degree of uniformity, but it’s more than that.

Pages and blogs that have been put up non-commercially, that is, without the primary intention of selling something, have greater scope for being unique. They have more manouverability because they can take any direction they want, rather than bang home a sales message. But even a great proportion of *them* seem to read the same.

And sales pages tend to be either woefully inadequate for selling anything, or using a sledgehammer in carrying on for screen-length after screen-length about how good their product is and why we ought to buy it.

Is it really so difficult to be different?

I think perhaps it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or over expensive. It takes thought and hard work, but unique copy that inspires, motivates, informs and entertains can be created. It is every day. Wouldn’t it be great if your web site or blog could have this kind of content regularly?

Philip Gegan

It’s not just repetitive work in factories and warehouses, shops and offices, that tends to rob us of our uniqueness. I’ve seen it happen in the legal profession, for example, where a kind of mass uniformity is welcomed by the legal establishment, and anyone with noticeable individuality is regarded as being a “loose cannon”.

In other words, everyone dresses more or less the same, acts and speaks more or less the same, and dresses more or less the same. Lawyers, of course, love precedent and convention, and so this extends into the written word, with letters containing the same phraseology being sent out by the untold thousands every day.

Anyone with a truly independent spirit runs from that kind of environment as fast as they can. Certainly I do. All the great people who have ever lived – the great creative geniuses of literature, music, the arts generally and science (of which I am not one) – all of them have been great individualists, indomitable and strong willed.

And they all specialised in what they did, yet were completely different from others in the same field of endeavour. So human.

I think it’s a good thing that we all specialise in what we’re good at, which invariably is what we enjoy the most. On the internet, some are good at design, some at writing, others at marketing, or bringing buyers and sellers together, some at programming and scripting, and so on.

And when we can trade with each other so easily online, we can buy and sell services that ourselves and others provide, and facilitate the distribution of wealth. This is how the internet has definitely had a positive influence on human affairs.

Philip Gegan
Check out our Forex PLR Article Pack offer

As everyone wakes up to the potential of social media to supercharge their online presence, and their business profits, there is going to be a demand like never before for people with the skills to promote businesses in this way.

But there are not that many people who can even begin to do this. A massive learning curve lies ahead for all of us. But for those who can write, or who are skilled at graphics, and who are familiar with the new social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, there is the opportunity for a vast amount of business – as much as you can handle (and more).

The new Facebook Group is designed to act as a resource for anyone, from whatever side, to learn more about this new form of marketing. I’ll post whatever I learn about the main social media sites, and I invite others to do this as well.

It’s important for all of us to realise what a unique opportunity this is, both for businesses to fight back against the recession and make more profits, and for writers and graphics artists, and possibly web designers as well, to find work very easily.

There’s more in the free report I’ve made available from philipgegan.com.

Philip Gegan

Brief history lesson. When the internet first took off around 1995-1996 it only had basic web pages, which were essentially online newspapers, magazines and sales letters. There was no inter-activity. The web site owners put their sites up, and the surfers viewed it. If the surfers liked it they kept coming back, if it was an information based site, or they bought the product if it was a sales page.

If you were a business owner and you wanted to attract new customers to your site the only option was to try for a high-up placing in the search engines. So fortunes were spent on consultant’s fees to get them a good position in various search engines (Google had not shown up at this early stage).

And because all the search engines were different and used different criteria (or algorithms, as we would say now), this was a near-impossible task. The main option outside search engines was banner advertising and building a list of prospects – but you still had to attract visitors to your web site in the first place.

Then came a few significant developments, which were

• forums, which enabled the surfers to give their opinions of just about anything, including what they liked and disliked on the web. They also enabled web site owners to leave comments or take part in discussions and create back links to their own sites.
• Google, which quickly became the market leader in search engines, and introduced the concept of “pay per click” advertising on the internet.
• Blogs, which took the inter-activity of the web to a new level, and put the creation of back links to your own web site onto a whole new level.

And now we have the next stage of all this, which is Social Media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, YouTube and Digg have revolutionised the internet. Now most people use the internet to communicate with their friends and colleagues (other than by email) and give voice to their opinions and concerns.

This has opened up the market for the small to medium sized business owner. If you know how to use these social media sites, or dozens of others like them, then you can massively increase your presence on the internet, discard offline marketing, and save yourself thousands in advertising costs.

The secret is just knowing how to use those sites. Or in finding someone who does.

Philip Gegan

Some people just have charisma in bucketfuls. They don’t have to try. They just have it. In fact, anyone who tries to have charisma doesn’t have it. It’s something that is either there or not there. As they say, “You’ve either got it or you haven’t.”

When the curtain goes up on the stage and the actors appear, one of them will have more charisma than all the others. It won’t necessarily be the actor with the leading role or the most striking costume. It might even be someone without a speaking part. But whoever it is, your eyes are drawn straight to him or her. That’s the actor who, if not famous yet, certainly will be before long.

It doesn’t matter how crowded the stage is, you’ll see the actor with the charisma. You’ll notice what he’s wearing, how he moves, and his reaction to everything going on around him. If the charisma is really strong, you’ll be drawn to him so much that you might not notice much about the other actors.

That’s what you want your web site to have. It’s the X Factor, the magical quality that makes one person, or one thing, stand out from all the others. With that in place, you have no worries about losing your prospective customers before they’ve finished reading the page. And then they’ll more than likely follow your guidance to fill in your web form or make a purchase.

So how can you get this for your web site or blog? Remember, anyone who tries to have charisma doesn’t have it. But you can study people with charisma, and you can study successful web sites that have this quality. What do charismatic people have, apart from charisma itself?

They are just themselves. They are honest and open. What you see is what you get. They do what they purport to do. They don’t try to be anything other than what they are. They don’t copy or imitate anyone else. They are truly unique.

They don’t care too much about how they come across to others because they know the people who matter to them will see their souls, and they have nothing to hide. They are there to serve, and they are happy with that.

So if you can follow the same rules for your site or blog, then you may be able to make it the charismatic magnet for all the people you want to attract to it.

Philip Gegan

There’s money to be made with PLR Article Packs. Just ask any successful internet marketer. And you can grab some great article packs from our home page – just click here.

It’s like a fisherman casting his line. He has to give a little in order to get what he wants. He mustn’t let his quarry know what he is really after, but must give reassurance that all is well, even favourable. And then, before he knows it, he is reeling in another fish.

Just as fish constantly seek food in the water, so people using the internet seek information. With the instant-gratification mentality prevailing, that means showing them in the first few seconds that your site or blog has something that will benefit them, that may solve the problem they have.

This has to be firstly through the look of the page. If it looks friendly and professional then the first hurdle has been cleared. The next stage is to have a headline that promises them the information, or the solution, they seek.

And the third stage? To have a winning opening paragraph that has them “hooked” into the rest of your page. When they pause to let the newly found content sink in, they may notice, at the edge of the page, an invitation to download some further free information, simply by inputting their name and email address.

All this depends on everything on the page being compelling, so the targeted prospect just HAS to read on and on. Take a fresh look at your home page, and other keyword-targeted pages, through the eyes of your prospects. Does each page meet these requirements?

If they do – congratulations. If they do not – it’s time to do something about it. Being able to “see ourselves as others see us” is not so very difficult, but it is a highly valuable skill that we should all develop.

Philip Gegan

Unique  PLR content, wonderful web copy, outrageous articles, tantalising Twitter posts and breathtaking blog entries supplied for a boringly reasonable price. More information at http://www.philipgegan.com

You may have come across it yourself. You click through to a site where you believe there will be some useful information about a subject you’re researching, and instead of reading something you can understand and follow, you find yourself reading complete nonsense.

How can people produce such stuff and then stick it up on their blog without bothering to read it? Or perhaps they did read it in many cases but still decided to put it up. Either way, it says something about what they think of their visitors.

It’s not just article spinners, which I mentioned briefly in the last posting on 25th May. It’s also another piece of software called “Automatic Content Providers”. These clever programs scour the internet, at the click of a button, for any articles, videos, images or audio files that are on the topic specified. The user then collects and slaps them up on his page, often without even looking at them.

Of course this can be done not just for the user’s own site or blog, but as a “service” for others. A lot of money can be earned by someone pretending to be able to provide valuable content for your site or blog. But if they use these article spinners or automatic content providers then they’re simply obtaining money by false pretences, and not providing a genuine service. Once their customers find out what is happening the game is up and these fraudsters have to look for a fresh lot of victims.

So the moral is to be very careful when you select a content provider for your web site or blog. Make sure you’re getting genuine, original content written by the person you believe to be writing it. No article spinners or automatically generated content.

Philip Gegan

See PhilipGegan.com for writing services that I can supply.

The second thing is how badly written most of the blog entries are. In fact I’ve come to realise that many of them are not actually written at all. They’re “spun” by a software program, which takes an article written by a human being and “spins” it so as to appear different to the search engines and article directories, even though it is essentially the same article as the original. It just appears at first glance to be different.

What’s the purpose of this? Well, it enables the original writer of the article to post it, not just once with just one link to his site or blog, but many times, with multiple links to his site or blog, therefore giving it a “boost” in its search engine ranking with a resultant increase in visitors and paying customers.

All article spinners do is take the original article and substitute various words in it for other words with the same meaning, so as to make it a “different” article. But really nothing has changed. No new information or viewpoint has been added. Nobody will gain any additional knowledge or information by reading it. Multiply this by many times – some article spinners boast of being able to “spin” an article by as many as 50 times – and we can see how the internet is being clogged up with drivel.

Take this as an example. I found this recently when researching an alternative health topic.

“To minimize the attack of hay fever, work out a check on what assortment of plants provide off their pollen in the year and while they are flying active during the season within your field of the world, try avoid being outdoors as much as viable. Honey contains pollen as well so maintain away from them.

Hay fever could be treated at home as fine. Prepare 8 oz warm salt water using 2 tablespoons of table salt and gargle it to decrease sore throat.

There are some kinds of medicines obtainable in the pharmacy or supermarkets and always follow a information on a actuality leaflet.”

Can you make sense of this? No, I couldn’t either. In fact it was a pain reading it. The trouble is that software can automatically change certain words but can’t judge whether the resulting sentence makes any sense.

For example the first “the” should be “an”, the word “assortment” was probably “kind” originally, the word “provide” was probably “give”, and “field” was probably “part”. The word “fine” in the first sentence of the second paragraph was “well” in the original article, and so on. As you can see, there are plenty more examples in this short extract.

So an article that made sense as originally written has been turned into gobbledegook by an article spinner, and the person who wrote the original article (or, more likely, stole the original article) has been too lazy to go through the output and make any corrections.

All this is a great pity because it devalues the internet as a source of information.

This is a call for everyone to shun article spinners. They add no value to any article or to the internet as a whole and in the long run they won’t enrich anyone who uses them. They’re a fraud.

Agreed? Let’s hear the views of everyone else out there.

Philip Gegan