While I have not been blogging on TheBIWiki, I have been using pages for various projects from selling properties to promoting my new T Shirt Company www.BlackEyedT.com

The site is such an easy way to promote so many things. Since we have not gotten around to developing the free site I am offering to activate a regular site at no charge until we do. Just reserve a site and email me Marc@theBigWiki.com and I will activate it.

You can do it.

Marc

In addition to our premium paid sites we have decided to offer a standardwiki site. The main difference is thestandardsitewillbefreeand will have advertising on it versusapremiumsite with no advertising forthe nominal fee.If you presently have a wiki site it will continue to be advertising free.

A free site that provides the user a base product for freewithadvertisinginstead a fee is common on the internet. Of course we feel our free site is an exceptional site - not only for the price - free- but also because it is simple to create a great promotional or maketing site in 30 minutes.

You will also see some minor changes to the site. Most notable the site will be marketed as a place to promote, advertiseorexpressyour business, yourwebsiteoryourself versus a place to build a web site.

While some people will use TheBIGWiki as their only place of businessorwebpresent(which we encourage, if its right for you) we have found that most of the people we talked to had a web site and were looking to advertise and get contacts and customers through internet community networking,ratherthan building a detailed complicated web site.

While the traffic continues to build and we can see that users do visit multiple sites we believe providingthenewoptionwill provided the best results for all TheBIGWiki users. Having the addtional option on the same site will take some more coding expertise, but Tim should have it up and running sometime in April

To Success!

Marc

You can make a great quality product but if no one wants it your out of business. There are great sites on line to find out what people are searching for and buying day in and day out. Once youdetermineyourniche you can see what your competition is offering. Your best bet is being a big fish in a small pond. So focus your niche. Determine who is your target market and what will make you special to your target market.

Once you have your product/service, you need people to find you - The web is growing so fast it is often like finding a needle in hay stack. Don't give up! Take baby steps - lots of them everyday. Most people never get to the tipping point. They try one or two things and give up. It almost sounds funny, but its true. Marketing is not about money - its about lots of personal effort. - ongoing effort - its not a task but a process.

I just checked the web stats for TBW site. It continues to grow every month. But what caught my eye was the stats for a new site TeeShirts. If you go to the site there is nothing there, other than coming soon. But it gets visitors every day. Its what I call the curiosity factor of the community. TBW should be part of your focus marketing plan. Think of it this way, TBW is a pond and the internet is an ocean. Are people more likely to find you if your boat is on the pond or the ocean?

Of course "coming soon" will only get one or two looks by a viewer before its crossed off the surfing list. A dynamic site will make people return often to see whats new.

You need to be a part of many communities until your users forms a community that tells the world about you.

I was just given a pedometer for my birthday. I need to get in better shape. Its not the 7,000 steps that I naturally take everyday that are going to make a difference. Its the extra 2,000 steps that will get me in shape. Itisthe same with every business.

Keep taking more steps every day,

Marc

They were very excited that they could advertise their business and web site on line by creating a simple thread to do just that. The fact that it was only a $100 to advertise for 2 years made it " a no brainer". We actually heard "send me and invoice, I'm in." They liked how a thread could be like their web site home page or totally different, but in either case the thread would direct traffic to their web site.

On the other hand we also met a couple of people just starting out who were not ready to pay a couple of thousand dollars for a web site. Our site offers an affordable alternative to a web site and will continue to be a valuable asset if and when they decide to purchase a full web site.

Our web stats show that the average visitor visits several site, confirming the threads are benefiting from the traffic of TheBIGWiki community.

If your reading the paper , watching the news , or maybe watching your business cash flow you know its a tough economy. You need to take the extra steps and one of those steps is adding a BIGWiki thread to your marketing campaign.

To results,

Marc

To quote one recent press release for the thread self storage profits on the magazine, Inside Self Storage, web site "The big wiki? I thought. What the heck is that? Turns out it's a website that allows folks to launch web pages quickly and easily, without all the mumbo-jumbo of having to build them from scratch. There's an extremely diverse community using the site." Click here to see the full press release.

We can already see the community traffic benefiting all the threads. Everyone can help by promoting their own threads. You can do this by:

Your own press release

Tell your friends, E mail your friends

Add your thread URL to your publications, facebook, web site and at the end of every email you send.

Now that you have a thread, you can help your friends save $5 when they buy a thread, by giving them your promotional code you received when you purchased your thread. You will get $25 for the referral. Make four referrals and your thread was free. As we are seeing almost everyone needs a thread.

Good luck with your new threads,

Marc

Of course we believe a BigWiki.com thread should be a part of your marketing plan.

The Authors have a web site www.gmarketing.com where you can sign up for their weekly news letter. I enjoyed reading their blog. You can also email them for their free list of 200 guerrilla marketing weapons.

Here are couple of photos of one small part of our guerrilla marketing - the old fashion bumper sticker.

If you need a bumper sticker, email me your address. Send me a photo of it on your car in the next 60 days and I'll make sure you get a thread for half price.

To having some fun,

Marc marc@thebigwiki.com

The people who run Non profit organizations and the people who support them are special people. They make the world a better place for all of us. To do our small part we would like to offer non profits a free thread page. Send me an email and I will help you get started.

I know some of you are going to refer your friends to TheBIGWiki.com and if you read my referral blog you know they can save $5 and you can make $25 by giving them your referral code. If you want to join other thread owners in donating your referral fees let us know. For 2008, we will be donating the money to the American Red Cross.

To helping others,

Marc Marc@TheBIGWiki.com

Do you recall, how when you first put up your existing web page, you let everyone know. Well with your new thread you can do the same thing!

Add a little every week. You can do it.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Marc

Just go to YouTube and find a video or "your YouTube video" and on the right side of the page YouTube will give you the code to copy and to embed on your thread. Use the "w" on the tool bar so you can see the code & embed the copied code. Any questions email me.

The video below is a funny video from a redsox ball game. If I can do it you can.

I loved the video John the Insurance man has of himself on his thread. He has a link that brings you to his YouTube Video. I will have to let him know how easy it is to put the video right on his site - without a link. If you have not seen it you need to check it out now. www.TheBIGWiki.com/sawicki

Later this weekend I will post my Feb money making idea for a thread. You won't want to miss it.

The Best,

Marc

Here is our on line ad we just started using. It really says it all.

Of course word of mouth will always be a part of our marketing. We want to thank everyone who has helped get the word out!

I was out with two friends last night and one friend brought up TheBIGWiki.com, the other had not heard about it yet. I simple said It was a web page ad for your existing web site & business. Where else can you get an ad for $100 - never mind for two years! Chances are good that a short conversation will lead to a new thread. Its fun to offer people something they need for a great price.

Don't forget you can these blogs automatically sent to you when they are written. Just go to the rss tab - its the orange wave symbol located near the top of the page - near the tool bar- and follow the directions.

If you have not built your thread yet, now is the time!

To your higher profits!

Marc

Heres how it works. When you purchase a page you will get an email with a promotional code. Recommend the site to a friend and when they purchase a page using the code they get a $5 discount and you will get a check for $25.

With a little promotion you can use this referral marketing plan to get your page for free.

Don't forget to check out TBW uses Ideas blog for great ideas for your thread page.

Dollars in your pockets!

Marc

How about a thread where you can develop your interests, whatever they may be. Sounds like fun to me.

What do you love to do? What is your hobby? What are you an expert at? Do you make or have access to a unique product? Many people started their own dream business based upon these questions.

Weve all heard it before, find something you love to do and the rest comes easy. With the Internet even the smallest niche can be very profitable. Are you ready to take the chance? What do you have to lose? A hundred bucks?

What do you have to gain? How about a great journey and endless possibilities to have fun and make money. We will be sharing a bunch of ideas in the coming days; maybe one will be for you or help you think of your own idea for a new business or blog. We will also be discuss ways to monetize your web page.

Advertise for two years for only $100 bucks - WOW!


If you already own your own business you probable spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars advertising every month. On TBW you get 730 days of advertising for $100. You cant beat that. In many cases much of the content can be taken from previous advertising or you companies existing web site. Its easy.

Your thread will help increase the SEO of your existing web site but even better it will be located in a growing community of people that will bring traffic directly to your business.

Or here's a crazy idea, why not develop an on line business that makes you a $100 a day!

Are you ready to take the plunge. I want to hear from you. E mail me at Marc@TheBIGWiki.com

See you on the beaches of the world,

Marc

Most of the threads on TheBIGWiki.com or the internet for that matter are not about making millions of dollars. But looking at sites that do make millions are often fun to check out. And more importantly they will often give us ideas and motivation for our own web business.

Every month I will review a big money site here and then provide you an idea at www.TheBIGWiki.com/TBW_uses_ideas (look for Light Bulb Jan08) that you could use for a thread. I know most of you will make a tread based upon your current business or an idea you have been thinking about, but its always fun to read about other peoples success and maybe this will give you the motivation to take the next step.

Teenage Millionaire. I know that would sound good to my 18year old daughter. Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old Michigan girl, borrowed $8 from her mother and started a Million Dollar Business. On her web site, Whateverlife.com, she simple gives away free MySpace background layouts.

When I went to the site I could not believe she would make any money never mind the $70K she earns ever month. I had to click through 2 pages of ads just to get to the free layouts. But when I mentioned the site to my daughter she knew all about it, and thats what counts.

Her website attracts more than 7 million monthly visitors and 60 Million page views. Her first Adsence paycheck was $2,790 dollars. She has rejected a $5 Million dollar offer for her site. Last year her web site generated over a million dollars.

It just goes to show that any thing is possible by targeting a niche market. In this case the niche market girls on Myspace/social networks is one of the largest markets on line. I don't have the stats but I know my space gets substantially more hits a day than google. This kind of business success can not be found anywhere but on line. Maybe we should have all our teenagers either start their own thread or give us ideas for ours.

More fascinating information about Ashley Qualls and her web site can be found in an article recently published by Fastcompany.

My idea for Jan is similar to Ashley's in that it would be directed to one of the largest niche markets on line. Check it out.

Enjoying the first day of the new year,

Marc

These could include subjects like ideas for your thread, marketing and increasing traffic to your thread, monetizing your thread, etc.

Many of these subjects will require several entries and will be used as references by thread owners. To insure they are available to you, we will create individual threads for them so you can use the information when you need it.

To make them easy to find we will start each of these threads with TBW. This way they will all be located together on TheBIGWiki.com index. So keep checking the index . Just added TBW uses ideas

We will continue to keep you current here, at our main blog, with the latest news, site updates and a lot of other good stuff.

Marc

If you are not familiar with RSS feeds you will be soon! RSS is simply a way of publishing the content of a page across the internet in Really Simple Syndication. You'll know if a page has RSS because you'll see this icon in your browser.

Here is some more information about RSS feeds.

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.

Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.

RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.

RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an "RSS Feed". People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called "RSS aggregators" have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called "RSS Channels" and "RSS Readers".)

Producing an RSS feed is very simple and hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters, as well as many weblogs.

RSS provides very basic information to do its notification. It is made up of a list of items presented in order from newest to oldest. Each item usually consists of a simple title describing the item along with a more complete description and a link to a web page with the actual information being described. Sometimes this description is the full information you want to read (such as the content of a weblog post) and sometimes it is just a summary.

For example, the RSS information for headlines on a local news website could contain the following information:

Item1:
Title:	Sidewalk contract awarded
Description:	The city awarded the sidewalk contract to Smith Associates. This hotly contested deal is worth $1.2 million.
Link:	http://www.gardencitynews.com/contractawards/sidewalk.htm
Item2:
Title:	Governor to visit
Description:	The governor is scheduled to visit the city on July 1st. This is the first visit since the election two years ago. The mayor is planning a big reception.
Link:	http://www.gardencitynews.com/news/2004/06/gov-visit.htm

The RSS information is placed into a single file on a website in a manner similar to normal web pages. However, the information is coded in the XML computer language for use by a program (the RSS aggregator) and not by a person like a normal web page.

Think of an RSS aggregator as just a web browser for RSS content. RSS aggregators automatically check a series of RSS feeds for new items on an ongoing basis, making it is possible to keep track of changes to multiple websites without needing to tediously read and re-read each of the websites yourself. They detect the additions and present them all together to you in a compact and useful manner. If the title and description of an item are of interest, the link can be used to quickly bring the related web page up for reading.

Here is a screen shot of an RSS aggregator in action. On the left is a list of the RSS feeds being monitored, along with an indication of the number of unread items in each feed in parenthesis. On the right are the details of the most recent items in a selected RSS feed (in this case, the New York Times).

There are many RSS aggregators available. Some are accessed through a browser, some are integrated into email programs, and some run as a standalone application on your personal computer.

It is getting more and more common for websites to have RSS feeds. They usually indicate the existence of the feed on the home page or main news page with a link to "RSS", or sometimes by displaying an orange button with the letters "XML" or "RSS". RSS feeds are also often found via a "Syndicate This" link. Text "RSS" links sometimes (there are lots of variations) point to a web page explaining the nature of the RSS feeds provided and how to find them. The buttons are often linked directly to the RSS feed file itself.

Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitor the feed for you. Many RSS aggregators come preconfigured with a list to choose from of RSS feed URLs for popular news websites.

Unless you are maintaining a website or want to create your own RSS feed for some other purpose, how the RSS feed is produced should not be of concern and you may skip this section.

The special XML-format file that makes up an RSS feed is usually created in one of a variety of ways.

Most large news websites and most weblogs are maintained using special "content management" programs. Authors add their stories and postings to the website by interacting with those programs and then use the program's "publish" facility to create the HTML files that make up the website. Those programs often also can update the RSS feed XML file at the same time, adding an item referring to the new story or post, and removing less recent items. Blog creation tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, and Radio automatically create feeds.

Websites that are produced in a more custom manner, such as with Macromedia Dreamweaver or a simple text editor, usually do not automatically create RSS feeds. Authors of such websites either maintain the XML files by hand, just as they do the website itself, or use a tool such as Software Garden, Inc.'s ListGarden program to maintain it. There are also services that periodically read requested websites themselves and try to automatically determine changes (this is most reliable for websites with a somewhat regular news-like format), or that let you create RSS feed XML files that are hosted by that service provider.

Here is a diagram showing how the websites, the RSS feed XML files, and your personal computer are connected:

The diagram shows a web browser being used to read first Web Site 1 over the Internet and then Web Site 2. It also shows the RSS feed XML files for both websites being monitored simultaneously by an RSS Feed Aggregator.

In addition to notifying you about news headlines and changes to websites, RSS can be used for many other purposes. There does not even have to be a web page associated with the items listed -- sometimes all the information you need may be in the titles and descriptions themselves.

Some commonly mentioned uses are:

• Notification of the arrival of new products in a store
• Listing and notifying you of newsletter issues, including email newsletters
• Weather and other alerts of changing conditions
• Notification of additions of new items to a database, or new members to a group

One RSS aggregator is all that you need to read all of the RSS feeds, be they headlines, alerts, changes, or other notifications. RSS is shaping up to be a very popular and useful means for communicating.

This information was gathered from Software Garden.

99 Headline Techniques Revealed


When youre trying to draw your readers into the text of your article or sales page, your headline is a crucial first element. Writers should carefully consider their headlines before publishing, to be certain that the headline they use is one that makes the best first impression on the reader. Here are 99 proven headline techniques that any writer can add to their arsenal.

1) How To

A How To.. headline grabs your prospects attention because it tells their brain they are about to learn something new that could benefit their lifestyle. The headline should get their attention and explain how to get their benefit faster, cheaper, easier, etc.

Example:

How To Get Out Of Debt In 1 Year Or Less!

2) Unlock

An Unlock headline grabs your prospects attention because when something is locked-up its perceived as being more valuable. Your product would of course be the key that will unlock the benefit for them.

Example:

Unlock The Secrets Of Selling High Ticket Items!

3) Discover

A Discover headline grabs your prospects attention because it gives your prospects a sense of adventure. Its just like in a story when someone discovers a treasure chest or a lost artifact.

Example:

Discover 3 Simple Ways To Reduce Your Unwanted Wrinkles!

Click here to find the next 96 headlines at Chris Blozynski blog

To Success! (with your new killer headlines)

Marc

Since your URL will also be the unique word(s) that describe your site they must be directly related to the contents of your site. The more you can focus your URL to your content the more relevant traffic you will get. For example there are several profession that could use the URL real estate. But for most, real estate, would not be the best URL because it is to general. Typically a general category, such as real estate can be focused by items such as location, type and other sub categories to increase the use of your site. Focused example could be Vermont Historical Houses, Utah Real Estate attorney, real estate forms, DYI Rehabs, Marketing Real Estate.

CapitalizeTheFirstLetterOf EachWord

don'tusealllowercase DITTOFORALLUPPERCASE

Unlike many sites TheBIGWiki.com allows spaces in the URL but the underscore symbol _ must be used when entered into the web. ( similar to a email address with a space)

If I can help you get started please contact me.

Marc Goodin Marc@TheBIGwiki.com

Tim and I want to personally welcome everyone! We hope our goal, to bring easy to develop and use web threads, is a match for your business or personal web site needs.

The site will be officially launched January 1, 2008!

We are excited that so many different uses for TBW site are coming from you. We heard from several business owners, how the impersonal nature of many corporate web sites could be overcome by having web thread pages for individuals. These web threads could be more about the individual, their philosophy, even their specialties. And of course they could link to the corporate site. Many professionals including real estate agents, insurance agents, car sales agents and many others could use this concept.

Others have said that they were paying for a simple index listing of their web site on a host site. For less money you can get a web thread that can be a mini business site that links to your full business site.

I like to ask everyone what they like and dislike about their existing web site. I am amazed how often I hear the compliant that it is both so aggravating and costly to have a change made on their site. Not with TBW, because you can easily make your own changes. One concept is supplementing your business web site with an ever changing seasonal web thread page on TBW.

Of course for many people their TBW thread will be their only web page for their brand new business, their blog, or their personal web page. The ideas are endless. We look forward to being part of the future with you. I look forward from hearing from you.

To Success! Marc Goodin