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Upcomming Markets for 2010

Upcomming Markets for 2010

The ongoing period of recession that the world is currently witnessing has without a doubt severely shaken markets and trades around the globe. The million-dollar question that now haunts people the world over is: which are the upcoming markets of 2010 which can be expected to show marked improvement? While there are obviously no fail proof answers to that one, the market trends being what they are, there are certainly many possibilities. The Internet has emerged as the most promising medium and this article we discuss some Internet-based business ideas that you can adopt.

Information Marketing

The Internet is the biggest communication platform in the world today and information is no longer a luxury but a necessity. And with this shift in its significance, information has become a saleable commodity. Be it any topic under the sun, from sports to fashion, from lifestyle trends to relationship advice, from commonly discussed matters to obscure ideologies, people the world over are seeking information en masse. Cash in on this trend by building a website or portal that imparts knowledge about a specific topic. Whether you are an expert in an academic field or gifted at an art, you can make a website and earn fantastically from the traffic generated by those who browse your page for data.

Dating Websites

Whether an economic downturn or not, romance continues to flourish since time immemorial and will do so forever. However, the modes and means of courting and finding love have changed drastically over the years and the same holds true for dating. Dating websites have been studied and researched in depth and it has been found that they are some of the best business ventures and come the closest to being fool-proof. Make sure you use a lot of creative thinking and research in coming up with an attractive domain name, carving out a specific niche for your dating agency and keeping a track on the competition. Several legal matters such as registering the domain name, finding an appropriate host server to park the site with and ensuring clients’ privacy and safety should be of the foremost concern.

Blogging

Blogs have become the most popular medium of conversation on the Internet. With no restrictions on the medium besides the new FTC rules, practically anybody can begin a blog and earn money from traffic, advertisements and sponsorships. In times where political, economic, social and cultural phenomenon are in transition and changing as we speak, personalized views and opinions have come to acquire great relevance. Begin your blog about a topic you are passionate about and watch your money pour in as the readership grows.

Affiliate marketing

One of the touted ‘get rich quick’ methods, this technique isn’t as easy as many claim it to be. The trick lies in persuading a person to buy your product. All one needs is an account with clickbank or Amazon or any such affiliate marketer and you get to earn a nice fat commission off every sale you make for them. Beware though, you will need to invest a bit in a good copywriter to write you a sales page attractive enough to convince someone to buy your product on the Internet. However, the profits can be as much as one grand a day or more.

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    4 Ways To Virally Market Your Website

    4 Ways To Virally Market Your Website

    I’ve been responding to a few requests for help on the Digital Point forums lately from webmasters who are having a few issues getting their message across to potential consumers and/or visitors. And you know what I’ve recommended in most cases? Viral Marketing

    Like a virus, viral marketing is designed to spread amongst a targeted community, ‘infecting’ person after person through word of mouth, consequently creating a knock-on effect. It is without a glimmer of doubt, extremely effective and simultaneously proven to work rather well. So the question is, how can we get viral marketing to work for your website?

    One of the most classic examples that comes to mind in the online world, is Hotmail and their now famous viral campaign. It was a simple and effective concept, that helped drive the email giant into becoming what it is today – and did I mention it was simple? The concept was setting up a free email service, in which anyone could sign up, and placing a small advertisement in each users signature; “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”.

    We live in an extremely complicated world. Many people are under the misconception that working simplicity into your efforts automatically expels you to the land of failure – when it often ironically works extremely well.

    Viral Marketing can be also mean staging an event to get people talking, whether it be something rather outrageous, hilarious or simply unique. I remember some years ago, a major mobile/cell phone carrier (Vodafone) had someone run into the middle of a sporting event – naked, with their company name written on them. From memory I think this happened in the UK – but please feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.

    To get people talking you need to stand out. Some very quick ideas for viral marketing campaigns are;

    1. Be Mysterious

    Announcing a product/feature with a minimal amount of detail, and issuing a countdown to ’something’. For instance, if I wanted to implement a forum into my weight loss website, I would announce that something new is coming soon, and subsequently insert a count down timer on my webpage. I’m not giving my audience any sort of details towards what’s coming, which consequently creates an atmosphere of suspense and anticipation. While this can be effective in generating hype, you must be aware that it also has the potential to backfire if your feature or product does not live up to this hype. It must be a genuinely useful and needed product or feature to effectively work.

    2. Challenges Work Wonders

    Engaging in some sort of challenge with your viewers. Some examples that I’ve come across over the years are; “If I can’t raise $72,000 from affiliate marketing – I’ll walk around in a dress for a day” or “If I reach one million unique views – I’ll donate xxxx to charity”. Employ creativity into your website coupled with a sense of humour, and you’ll be absolutely amazed at the results. When I was running a forum centered around the discussion of vBulletin, I made a bet with my users that if I failed to bring in a certain number of new signups within a month (I really can’t remember the figure anymore), I’d send $10 to every single user and colour my hair pink for a day. Users would keep coming back to the forum to check on the progress, and other blogs, websites and forums began covering what was happening, which consequently generated massive publicity for us.  Ironically, this pushed us into the required number of user signups, which meant my dignity and bank account were preserved.

    3. Pull a Real Stunt

    Pulling a stunt, writing about it and/or video-taping it, and publicizing it on your website. Yeah sounds very simple, and almost like a little bit of common sense, but many of us seem to miss the mark with this one. Either we do something that really isn’t explosive enough to generate the hype we’re after, or something that somehow oversteps the mark. A few years ago, the CEO for Host Gator pretended to be homeless and attempted to find out how much he could earn by asking people for money (which was all later donated to charity). While this happened a while back, it’s still something that springs to mind every time somebody brings up HostGator. Why? Because it was unique. It put somebody who typically sits at the top of the hierarchy, who should be earning a nice little figure, into a position in which he was at the mercy of passersby. And people loved it. Like I mentioned about point number two, this little stunt encompassed a blend of humour and charity which generally sat pretty well with the public.

    4. Controversy doesn’t sell

    Actually yes it does, I’m just talking trash. Seriously though, engaging in something controversial is typically beneficial. Controversy sells! It does it does it does. You’ve probably heard it a million and one times, and while it is much easier said than done, it is an absolutely fantastic tool to drive an avalanche of visitors to your site. Look at the Shoemoney vs Dennis exchange. I bet a good chunk of Shoemoney readers had absolutely no clue who Dennis Yu was up until this conflict between the two. In my opinion and without trying to offend anybody, Dennis really did himself an injustice in his attempt at defending himself, and could have potentially turned the whole ordeal into something positive if he paid a little more attention to the dispute. I’d also be willing to bet a heap of people who weren’t really fans of either party begin tuning into both blogs to check in on what was happening.

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    45 Reasons Why Internet Marketing Is A Kickass Job

    45 Reasons Why Internet Marketing Is A Kickass Job

    So yesterday I was entrapped within deep thought in the midst of an intense 36 hour working day and came up with a list of reasons as to why internet marketing is such a fantastic profession to get into. Well not really… I was actually watching Top Gear, but the second part is true. Without further ado:

    1. Get the option of working from home: in your PJs!

    2. You are your own boss.

    3. So even if your boss sucks, who cares!

    4. Minimal investment.

    5. You get paid for working online.

    6. It sounds very impressive and professional.

    7. Global audience. Too bad you’ll still be sitting at your PC

    8. You need to be creative.

    9. You’re never late for work.

    10. Greater accountability to advertisers.

    11. You get to learn about new technology (actually, you HAVE to, but well…)

    13. Unlimited growth potential.

    14. You don’t need to be a genius to get started (which is why I’m here)

    15. It’s not rocket science (Refer #14…duh!!)

    16. You get to expand your knowledge base as you learn about new stuff.

    17. You can schedule your own lunch breaks…still in your PJs!

    18. You don’t have to shave…even if you’re a guy.

    19. You can always quit and work as a ‘consultant’ because of your ‘experience’.

    20. Your boss loves you.

    21. Your writing can actually earn you big bucks!

    22. You get to do exciting stuff like tele-seminars, ad development, and…(yawn!)…zzzzzz….

    23. It’s the ‘in’ thing.

    24. No previous experience required.

    25. It beats unemployment any day.

    26. There are chances you might get discounts from clients.

    27. It has a bright future, as the internet is on a growing curve…hopefully.

    28. You can print “Internet Marketer” on your business card.

    29. You get to have a business card. (If you wish to. Who doesn’t like business cards?)

    30. You will never run out of topics to discuss at your next BINGO session.

    31. You get to make money off starting controversy.

    32. Because I say so.

    33. You don’t need to learn HTML anymore to develop your own website.

    34. It is never too late to jump in, with more and more people getting introduced to the internet every day.

    35. Digital Product distribution costs are almost zero.

    36. You get to serve mankind…wait…

    37. Profit margins are high, higher than in traditional marketing.

    38. You don’t have to go for boring meetings if you don’t want to.

    39. If you are uncomfortable with one-on-one interactions, this is the perfect job for you.

    40. No one on one interaction. Human beings will not need to be exposed to you ugly mug.

    41. Your website earns money for you 24/7.

    42. You can be a complete lunatic (like me) and chances are, people will barely notice.

    43. It can be done part time along with your boring, not-so-much-of-a-kickass day job

    44. No more traffic jams to deal with on your way to work.

    45. One gets to make other fun lists like this.

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    How To Make The Most Of Google Adsense

    How To Make The Most Of Google Adsense

    Google Adsense is the reason behind the increasingly enthusiastic interest shown in blogging and website development in the past few years. Since Adsense catapulted itself into the market, people have realized that making money on the internet is not only possible, but also easy and generally feasible.  Adsense allows you to design and incorporate advertisements on your website or weblog, thereby allowing you, as the owner of the said website or weblog, to make money out of it.

    Not everyone, however, is making the most of Google this. For every massive success story, like this, there is nothing short of an ocean of failures. The fact is, most people really never get past making a few dollars with Adsense. Why? Because people seem to over complicate things, which is typical when you take a look at the society we live in today. Sometimes it pays to look at the fundamentals – so here it goes!

    Place your ads right where visitors can see them.. Right? Wrong

    When it comes to placing ads, you have to be careful not to be too obtrusive on the reader’s area of interest. In my experience, placing Adsense in areas in which the visitor is about to leave your website (like the footer) has worked for me. The problem in allocating prime real estate to Adense is that your competitors websites are typically displayed before the user has an opportunity to browse your site. From experience, this has been a terrible in terms of retaining visitors.

    You want people to have an opportunity to browse through your website in the hope that they may become regular readers. You should be seeking to create a loyal visitor base, and subsequently profit off them when they’re ready to leave by providing them with a list of relevant websites in the form of Adsense ads. If for example you own a website based on fitness, your Adsense ads should be geared towards something like sporting goods, nutritional supplements and/or gym equipment. Please do keep in mind that this is really a long term thing, and will probably deflate your short term earnings but simultaneously allow you to hold onto more visitors and therefore increase your long term profits.

    This draws me to my next point.

    Use section targeting for relevant ads

    A common mistake many webmasters make is opting for higher paying ads which bear little to no relevance to their site content. Section targeting is absolutely fantastic in ensuring the ads displayed on your site are in fact relevant and naturally attract a higher click through rate. There’s really no point wasting space in this post by rewriting what Google have already published. You can find Google’s explanation on setting up section targeting here.

    There are a few points to consider when using section targeting.

    • You should be focusing only on relevant content, and should therefore exclude sidebars, footers, etc..
    • Google encourages targeting larger chunks of content in contrast to isolated paragraphs.
    • According to Google, it is acceptable to use multiple sets of tags on any page.

    Integrate the ads effectively into your website

    There are two ways of integrating Adsense into your website – through design, and through ofcourse Google Analytics.

    Integrating your ads into your design seems like such a simple tip, yet the amount of websites that attempt to ensure their Adsense ads are a completely different colour to their overall theme is simply staggering. Once again referring to experience with previous projects, implementing an integrated ad into your website typically yields more favourable results.

    You don’t want to create the impression that the ads are in fact ads, but rather a list of helpful and related websites designed to ensure the visitors receives maximum value from your site.

    The ease behind integrating Adsense and Google Analytics is absolutely fantastic, and a definite must for any webmaster interested in simply tracking what works and what doesn’t. Without being able to do so, you’re not just restricting yourself, but also setting yourself up for failure. You need to be able to adapt to the rapid changes of the internet, otherwise you simply can’t keep up with your competitors.

    According to the Adsense Blog, once you have everything integrated you’ll be able to:

    • The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren’t monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.
    • The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.
    • Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

    Setting the whole thing up is about as easy as labelling me crazy.

    1. Click ‘Integrate your Adsense account with Google Analytics’ inside your Adsense control panel.
    2. Place the code you receive onto the appropriate pages.
    3. Give it a little bit of time, and simply jump onto Analytics and enjoy!

    Is there anything I’ve missed? Let me know!

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    First It Was Chow, Now Its The Cow

    Less than 24 hours after submitting my guest post to John Chow, it appears I have also been successful with submitting my list of the top ten common mistakes in web promotion to none other but the brilliant John Cow.

    I’m absolutely elated at the moment.

    If you haven’t already, go on over and check it out!

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    My First John Chow Guest Post!

    So I woke up this morning after shooting one of the undisputed kings of making money online – John Chow – a guest post I had in mind, and found it published!

    Very exciting stuff.

    Go on over and check out my 20 tips to improving your blog!

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    4 Quick Things To Consider When Doing SEO

    4 Quick Things To Consider When Doing SEO

    While it is without doubt that search engine optimization will continue to hold less and less real signifiance in the online world, many people will continue to persue this method of web promotion because of the explosive surge of traffic it is usually associated with.

    Whether you’re employing a SEO professional (for the record – a good chunk of them are liars ) or doing it yourself, there are a few common mistakes which have the potiential to untie your efforts. Hence forth my dear readers, here are five basic, but surprisingly commonly overlooked aspects of SEO (in no partcular order).

    1. Your keywords

    When I say effective, I’m not talking about choosing something which is highly searched for and extremely competitive. The cold hard truth is you’re going to find it overwhelming difficult to compete for terms which have a mountain of competitors. I highly recommend using Keyword Corral to basically scope out just how competitive a keyword is. Use the Google keyword tool to create a list of keywords, before sending them to the Adwords Traffic Estimator and then finally exporting and opening them in Keyword Corral.  As a rule of thumb (although this obviously various from person to person), I’d recommend you target keywords with less than 8,000 competitiors.

    2. Keyword Density

    Another simple yet commonly overlooked factor is the density of keywords.  According to the much beloved Wikipedia;

    Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

    In essence, it is the foundation of on page optimization and therefore plays a pivotal role in your mission to conquer the first page of Google. Many people realize this, and perhaps unknowingly seem to over do this and consequently end up writing pages for Google instead of their site visitors by turning perfectively readable sentences into reptitive messes. It’s really not too hard to fall into this trap. It is therefore absolutely imperative to strike a balance between implementing your keywords into your content, while also ensuring your content remains engaging and more importantly, comprehendable.

    3. Your webhost

    Where your website is hosted plays a much larger role in search engine optimization than you may think. What amazes me about so many SEO ’specialists’ (not bagging out the whole industry of course) is that they seem to continously overlook this. The fact is that search engines take into consideration certain factors when deciding on your rank and the efficiency of your server or lack thereof can seriously affect your rank. Why? Because a consistently unavailable website may be de-indexed by the search engines if it is offline when crawled. Futhermore, sites with poor uptime receive a lower Google Trust Rank, which is an algorithm developed by Google to determine search engine placement. To top this off, because of how easy it is to enter the web hosting market – the amount of shady and poor quality hosts currently roaming the internet is at an all time high. You need to carefully research your web hosting options before making any commitments. This leads me onto my next point.

    4. Your website IP address

    Another thing that is often overlooked as trivial is the class of your website’s IP address.  Your websites may be judged based on your IP address and could receive a lower ranking if your IP is grouped in location with some other sites that are not too righteous.  While your website may be totally legit, if it is grouped with other not so well ranked sites because it happens to be in the same place, that may lower your rank as well. In addition the server you choose may assign you to a shared IP address, which could yield the same result, wherein the persons that you share with may come into some bad lighting and this will affect your website as well. The fact is IP addresses are often banned because the website administrators are not following the rules and regulations set forth by the search engines and you may find that your website has become a part of that list even if you were not wrong. A dedicated IP address is therefore an absolute nessasity.

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    What We Can Learn From The Art Of War

    What We Can Learn From The Art Of War

    The Art of War is unquestionably a timeless, highly motivational, and overwhelmingly informative text on military affairs. Yep … military affairs. So I suppose you’re wondering what the heck I’m doing writing about something designed to assist generals and warriors wage war against their enemies. The truth in the matter is, that as a webmaster or internet marketer – we too can be associated with being a commander in a war fought on multiple fronts. The war against our competitors often stretches through multiple borders into the depths of the online world and can often be brutal. From Google rankings, to market reputation, to product superiority/differentiation we are continuously and often unknowingly at war.

    Getting straight into it, the real question is how can this book be applied to our online endevaours? I’m going to pick it apart, and attempt to translate its military meaning into something we can relate to and effectively employ. Here we go..

    1. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

    This is one of my personal favorite quotes from the book, and has been something I’ve continuously implemented into various online ventures. This also reinforces the concept of urgency I think many people neglect to use when trying to make money. Without drifting off point, I think the worst mistake you can make is not applying urgency to your work.  My interpretation is that basically when launching a project, it is often better to keep the launch a secret, rather than creating a sense of anticipation. Why? Because your competitors can feed off this anticipation, and consequently engage in a marketing campaign so as to shift the attention off your project come launch time. I’ve had success with practically appearing out of no where, and carrying out an extensive and heavy marketing campaign. By the time my competitors have been able to react, I would have already established myself in the industry which therefore make their efforts are much easier to offset.

    2. Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.

    This is a very straight forward quote, however I want to create an emphasis on conducting market research before you launch a product. It’s absolutely paramount to understand what exactly your competitors are doing, and identifying trends in their business model. This information will therefore help you anticipate how they will react. Sometimes using the Way Back Machine can prove extremely beneficial. I think it’s also worthwhile to note that doing anything to make money online constitutes operating a business, at least on some level. It should therefore be treated as a physical business would, with an extensive level of research and planning being applied.

    3. Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger; that there may be advantage from defeating the enemy, they must have their rewards.

    The literal interpretation is a little bit savage, however when you apply this to what we’re doing, it actually makes quite a bit of sense. Once again, this is something that I’ve implemented in the past – especially when running a web hosting company a few years back. Basically ‘killing the enemy’ represents a universal objective (for example attaining a certain market share, or generating a specific profit) that your entire team should be working towards. Your team should therefore be motivated to achieve this objective through some sort of reward; whether it be monetary or personal or whatever. For the record, I’m talking about a reward in addition to a regular base wage.  Correctly motivating employees, or even contractors, is something no webmaster or internet marketer should ever overlook.

    4. You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.

    This in my opinion is a critical mistake a lot of webmasters and internet marketers seem to continuously make. That is of course – targeting extremely saturated markets without adopting any real type of niche, which therefore leaves them exposed to a flood of competitors – mainly of which are typically equipped with monsterous market share and budgets. As such, the advice of the wise Sun Tzu is therefore with merit. Attacking undefended positions, or niches, is an easier way to effectively ensure success and therefore gives you the advantage of usurping a much smaller number of competitors. The internet is so easily accessible to everybody and just about anybody these days. This means that a good chunk of websites catering to a saturated market typically fizzle out because nobody pays attention to them. Nobody can pay attention to them. As cliche as it sounds, imagine you were after some ringtones, and you were hypothically standing infront of a crowd of about 20,000  people, with each individual screaming at you to visit their website. You will probably only comprehend what the people at the front are saying and probably give them a shot out of sheer convienience. Who knows what gems are sitting at the back of that crowd – but are you realistically going to sort through 20,000 websites to find the best ringtones site? Definitely not.

    In closing, I think this book is absolutely fantastic and is highly recommended for anybody after something which can be applied to so many aspects of their lives. Running a website is simply something in which you need to sieze control of, and therefore act aggressively to stand out in such a competitive online world.

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    Updated Theme

    You may have (ofcourse you have!) noticed a brand spankin’ new theme which I’m still playing with at the moment. Please bear with me as I get this baby lookin’ just right over the next 24 hours.

    Thanks!

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    Nine Link Baiting Strategies

    Everyone knows it. I know it, you know it, your visitors know it, my pet lemon tree knows it. Link baiting is one of the most rewarding, well proven, cost effective marketing techniques at a webmasters disposal and allowing an opportunity to caste out some bait slip by, is definitely something you’ll be kicking yourself about later down the track. Link baiting has the ability to easily turn you into an overnight success. It can completely transform your SEO ranking, and even dramatically increase the value of your website.

    For those new to all this, link baiting is practically supercharged link building. Instead, link baiting is the art of generating something so unique, significant and outstanding, that it spreads virally consequently generating links to your website. Here’s nine ideas that can be used to encourage link.

    1. Run a contest to encourage user activity

    Organizing a contest designed to encourage users to interact more can often generate massive amounts of buzz – especially when an exciting prize lies await. Give away products or services relevant to your niche and remember to let generosity shed it’s colours – the more you give away, the more exciting the competition as a whole is. Offering an iPod to the publisher of the most interesting five posts on a technological forum for example, would be extremely effective if handled correctly. The bigger the contest, the bigger the feedback from outside sources.

    2. Organize a giveaway.

    Organizing a massive give away is also extremely effective, and in my experience has yielded much better responses than contest. A perfect example for a blog would be to offer $50 to a random four individuals who subscriber to your RSS feed.

    3. Make an extremely unpopular political comment on your website.

    Shoemoney tried this by deeming the seemingly unpopular US President George Bush as the greatest president in the history of the United States. This generated a mega amount of buzz both on and off the website, with back links cropping up left, right and center

    4. Make a mysterious, vague and interesting comment.

    Humans are naturally curious beings, and using phrases such as ‘change is on its way…’ or ‘it’s coming’ can assist you in using that curiosity to your advantage. Make sure that ‘the change’ is worthwhile and lives up to the hype, or this can very well backfire.

    5. Contradict the big guys.

    Finding fault in what the bigger websites say can often be extremely challenging but yet very very rewarding, especially if you can bring up some evidence to support your claim. This can add credibility to you, and shift some of their viewers onto your website, especially if word gets out.

    6. Publish a guest post on an established blog in your niche.

    Make sure you post something unique and compelling to read, as this is your opportunity to lure some of the host blogs readers onto yours. Remember to make sure you’re allowed to include a by line in your post.

    7. Create a humorous blog post/page.

    A very long way back, Darren posted a list of blog posts comparing blogging to alcohol, dating, golf and fishing, among a series of other things. Definitely a very amusing read, and something that can generate links for both him and the writers. This can also easily be applied to websites.

    8. Expose an ill-dealing in your industry.

    Exposing an ill-dealing in your industry by conducting your own investigation and being the first in on the scoop can yield absolutely explosive results. Make sure what you’re saying is genuine, and doesn’t defame anybody.

    9. Arrange an interview with a success in your industry and grill them.

    I know it’s much easier said than done, but arranging an interview with a renowned and a well respected industry figure can on its own yield traffic and results. Placing them on the spot by projecting unexpected questions at them is what really spices things up. Be creative, but also ensure that they do not take offense to these questions.

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