6 Startup Tips for Women Entrepreneurs by Peri H. Pakroo J.D.

 Though there is some overlap in issues men and women face when starting a business, women entrepreneurs face some unique challenges and concerns. Here are six tips that can help women with their most common business start-up issues.

More women than ever before are grabbing the reins and starting their own businesses. The number of women-owned small businesses is growing approximately twice as quickly as the national average for all start-ups.

For entrepreneurs of all stripes -- women and men included -- the pre-start-up phase is typically characterized by a flood of questions about what exactly it takes to make it in business. Are there different answers to these questions for men versus women? Not really. Every business needs to be based on a solid idea, aimed at a profitable market or niche, have solid systems in place, and market itself effectively. And of course, the legal and bureaucratic rules facing women entrepreneurs are exactly the same as those facing men.

But as many women business owners will tell you, the road to success for women often involves its own unique set of curves. Surveys of women business owners show that women's business concerns tend to skew towards issues such as finding work-life balance, start-up (or expansion) financing, and marketing. The following tips address some of the issues and concerns that are most commonly faced by women entrepreneurs.

1. Start a business that works for you and fits with your personal life. There are no rules as to what a "real" business looks like. For some businesspeople, success might mean an international operation with hundreds of employees and annual revenues in the tens of millions. For others, a small consulting firm or artisan business that pays a healthy salary and allows generous personal freedom might be considered the pinnacle of success. The key is to take the time early in the planning process to consider this question and decide for yourself what your ideal vision is for your business and your personal life.

2. Don't sweat the bureaucracy. A lot of would-be entrepreneurs, women and men alike, find themselves stuck on the verge of taking the leap into starting a business, but confused about how to tackle the legal rules of getting started. This hang-up is always grounded more in fear than reality; the truth is that clearing the bureaucratic hurdles isn't usually big deal.

You can usually start a sole proprietorship (the legal term for a one-owner business) or a partnership (a business with more than one owner) by registering with just one government office. And for business owners who want protection from personal liability for business debts -- often referred to by the legal jargon "limited liability" -- the simplest corporations or limited liability companies (LLCs) require only a couple more registration tasks to complete.

Of course, there's a lot more to launching a successful small business than dealing with bureaucratic requirements. For starters, you'll need to have a sound business idea, and you'll need to be able to develop good management skills to guide it to success. This is where you should put your mental energy and good ideas; don't waste precious brain cells worrying about the legal hurdles.

3. For businesses with moderate to significant overhead, it is crucial to start the business with adequate funds. Starting a business without enough money to ride out the early lean days (described as "undercapitalization") is the most common reason that businesses fail. Undercapitalization is less of an issue with small service-based businesses that don't have many fixed expenses. But businesses with overhead such as rent, salaries for employees, utility bills, inventory, equipment, insurance, or other fixed costs absolutely need to plan carefully and pull together enough funding to support the fledgling business as it works up to speed.

Also, though it's important to start your business with enough capital, that doesn't mean that every business needs piles and piles of money to get off the ground. Plenty of mega-successful businesses were started on a shoestring: Apple Computer started in a garage; Hewlett-Packard started in the dining room of the Packard home; the list goes on and on. Generally speaking, a business that can find creative, thrifty ways to provide its product or service -- especially in its early days -- will typically find more success than a business that adopts a "spend more money" approach.

4. If you need start-up or expansion financing, consider sources other than traditional banks. One of the concerns most commonly cited by women entrepreneurs is difficulty finding start-up financing. And it's little wonder: traditional banks typically don't lend money to new ventures that don't have a track record of success or creditworthiness. Instead of focusing on conventional big-chain banks, start-ups should instead look for local community banks, credit unions, and other local financial institutions that have a vested interest in the health of the local economy. Often, their application processes and criteria are softer than the big banks.

Two resources that women should definitely look into are Women's Business Centers and community development financial institutions. Women's Business Centers (WBCs) exist nationwide and focus on supporting women entrepreneurs through business training and counseling, and access to credit and capital, among other services. Community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which are certified by the U.S. Treasury, are a fast-growing segment of the business financing market specializing in loans to underserved communities and populations. CDFIs usually -- but not always -- have a specific focus such as improving economic opportunities in blighted communities or supporting women- or minority-owned entrepreneurs. Both WBCs and CDFIs can be especially helpful for start-ups, businesses with poor credit, and businesses seeking relatively small loans, generally up to $100,000. Even better, they often offer guidance and expertise to your business in addition to financing, which will help your chances of success.

As an example, the fabulous nonprofit where I teach entrepreneurship classes -- WESST in Albuquerque -- is both a WBC and a CDFI. It offers a wide range of high-quality classes on business planning, financial management, and marketing, plus offers loans and one-on-one counseling. With an organization like WESST on its side, a business gets a major boost in its chances of success.

5. Network like a social butterfly -- it is one of the best ways to market your business and create profitable opportunities. Networking involves actively cultivating relationships with people, businesses, community leaders, and others who present possible opportunities for your business -- not just as potential customers, but also as vendors, partners, investors, or other roles. Remember, networking is not the same thing as sales! Rather than the simple goal of making a sale, a huge goal of networking is to inform other businesspeople and influential people about what you do in hopes that they will recommend your business to their circle of contacts.

I look at networking more as a self-employed lifestyle than a specific activity. You are "networking" every time you attend an event held by a local trade association, get to know other business owners and community leaders, send an email introducing two of your contacts to each other, write a letter to the editor, participate in an online discussion group, or have lunch with another local business owner.

6. Forge relationships with contacts before you need help from them. For example, if you need the support of a local politician on an upcoming city zoning decision, you'll have a better chance of getting the politician's vote if he or she already knows you and thinks favorably of your business than if you place a call to his or her office out of the blue.

A Guide To Pursue Your Passion With Success: 14 Essential Steps by DRAGOS

1. Know what you want to do

So you know you have a passion in something. How do you want to pursue this passion? What are the key channels you want to use to express your message? Choose the channels you are most passionate and build your business around them. These will become the foundations of your business. You don’t need to be limited with just 1 medium.

For example, my passion is in personal development. I love helping others achieve their personal best in life. There are many ways I can do this, such as via being a counselor, a teacher, a coach, a trainer, and so on. I decided to start off with The Personal Excellence Blog, as the internet as a medium has the low barriers to entry and allows me to instantly reach out to large audiences. From there, I write articles and share my best learnings and advice. It has since become the key channel where people know about what I do.

After 4 months of blogging, I started to give 1-1 coaching for readers who want personalized attention on their goals. I also began to branch out to speaking and training via workshops. Most recently, I started writing a book to reach out to more people. All these channels help me express the same message to help others.

There is no limit to the number of channels you can use to express your passion. The most important thing is you need to know what exactly you want to do first and how you want to do it. The clarity will give you focus in your path.

2. Identify your target audience

Every venture has an audience it is reaching out to, and the same goes for yours. Who do you want to reach out to? How old are they? What are they doing in life? How can you help them?

Knowing your target audience is important because they will become central to your plans. For example, what product you want to sell (step #3), how you are going to reach them (step #4) and the pricing you are going to adopt (step #9). You can only answer these questions if you know who exactly you are reaching out to. There is no one size fits all solution. The more you know who your audience is, the better you can cater to them.

Don’t just think you know your audience too – really get down to understand them. Research if you need to. Do a survey. Talk to them. Get up close and personal. The degree you understand your audience determines how well you can meet their needs.

For example, I’m currently writing a book on Passion & Money (how to pursue your passion and earn money doing it). To ensure I’m writing in line with my readers’ needs, I wrote a blog post to ask my readers to share with me the questions they want to have on the topic. Some were questions I anticipated and quite a few were new angles I did not consider before! It was a pleasant surprise and I’m really glad I had sought for their opinions. If I hadn’t asked, I would be writing a book which I thought will be valuable for them, but wouldn’t be. I would have wasted all that time writing the book! Their replies helped me to write a book that will be valuable to those who want to pursue their passion successfully.

Further reading:

How To Define Your Target Market (Success Designs)
How To Define Your Target Market (Entrepreneur.com)
Determining the Target Audience of Your Small Business

3. Create your products/services

I’ve been to many blogs where the bloggers yearn to make a living out of their blogs, but I’m not entirely sure what they are selling. There are 1-2 ad channels here and there, a free ebook gets readers to sign up for their feed, 2-3 affiliate products and a bunch of amazon links. It seems more like a random “try any method that earns me money” rather than a clear product/service selling strategy. Unfortunately, as random as this is, the earnings you get will be random too.

Get clear on what you are selling. What are your key revenue streams for your business? Is it through products? Through services? What products? What services? With the 80/20 rule, typically we can expect 20% of the items we are selling to generate about 80% of our revenue. Get clear on those 2-3 key items that will help you generate the bulk of your revenue. Then, ensure you create these items with the highest value possible (step #12).

4. Have a marketing plan

No one is going to know about your business if you don’t market it out. You have to create a marketing plan to get people to know about you. There are different ways to do this. One way is to study how other businesses in your niche get the word out. Another way is to imagine yourself as the target audience and think about how you will seek out information on the topic. Then, tap into those channels as your marketing plan.

When I first started The Personal Excellence Blog, I did a sizable amount of research on how to market and promote my site. I found out there were many different methods like as (1) social media like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter (2) posting comments on other blogs/forums (3) posting articles on popular article directories like Ezine and Hubpages. A lot of time was spent in the first few year on getting the word out. Some worked very well (such as hitting the front page of Digg, Delicious and SU), while others were not so effective. The key is to experiment and choose what works best for you. Even today, a key part of my blog development plans includes marketing, primarily through guest posting. If you want to grow your business to a larger scale, you need to have a plan to market it out.

Further reading:

10 Small Business Marketing Strategies That Work
4 Free Ways To Market Your Business
5. Have clear goals and stick to them

When working in an employee in a company, there are structures in place and clear list of responsibilities for your role. There are expectations from top management and targets to fulfill for your appraisals. However, when you are working for yourself, you are the person who calls the shots. When you don’t have to account to someone else, it can be easy to slip and stagnate. Form clear goals and hold yourself accountable to them.

Further reading:

The Art Of Setting Great Expectations
Success Goal Achievement Step 1: Establish Your Goal
Locke’s Goal Setting Theory on SMART goals (MindTools)
6. Create your business guidebook

For every project I do, I have a guidebook where I write my goals, strategies, plans and learnings.It’s like a success roadmap. I use excel workbook because it’s so easy to organize information. Similarly, for my personal development business, I have a guidebook which guides me through the running of my personal development business. In it, there’s my business purpose, values, strategies, plans, long-term and short-term goals, administrative information, etc. I started this book since the early days I started my business, and it’s been with me ever since. Over time, I built on it to include more information, such as my learnings from rolling out my plans and what to do differently. The objective is to have a guidebook that contains the essential information to bring your business to success. This is a document you will refer to every step of the way. It is meant to be work-in-progress, meaning to be updated every step of the way as you acquire new learnings.

Further reading:

Create a Business Plan by Answering 4 Simple Questions (Wisebread)
How To Write A Business Plan (Entrepreneur.com)
7. Do things for free at first

As part of your marketing drive (#4), you might want to consider giving value away for free to drive quick awareness. This is a strategy I’ve used and it has worked really great for me.

For example, I give away many of my best advice and learnings for free at my blog, through my articles. Not only that, I also invest many hours writing these articles. Every article takes me about at least 5-6 hours to craft, write and revise. I’ve written many series that took days and a lot of hard work to write, such as how to discover your purpose, how to overcome procrastination and how to move on from relationships. Giving so much value away for free has undoubtedly help to drive quick awareness of my work. Many readers have since passed my site on to their friends, family, and through Facebook/Twitter. If I had made my blog a subscription only channel, it would not have the awareness it has today. Even for my coaching and workshops, I initially offered them for free to get the word out, though I never got to do that for long as the demand quickly soared.

8. Have monetization plans in place

Your business may have high awareness among your audience, but if you don’t have monetization plans in place, you aren’t going to earn money. Your traffic isn’t going to automatically convert into money by itself. Get clear on how you are going to earn money. Are you going to monetize through products, services, or both? What is your anchor product/service going to be? What are the ancillary products/services?

One of the reasons that makes DragosRoua.com a business, and not just a blog, is that Dragos has a clear portfolio of products and services he’s selling. He sells ebooks/books, audio podcasts and he runs workshops, and there are probably more to come in the future.

Further reading:

The First Year Of Blogging ñ Money
101 Ways to Monetize Your Blog Without Irritating Your Readers
How To Make Money Online (John Chow’s Blog)
Shoemoney – Skills to Pay the Bills (Jeremy Schoemaker’s Blog)
9. Know your pricing strategies

If you are not careful, it’s possible you can price yourself out of the market. In one of the workshops I just did last month, I had priced myself significantly out of the market range. I had set the full-day workshop for 15 people to be $180 USD. I came up with the pricing as it was an affordable pricing for corporate training. The value that was packed in the workshop was also definitely worth more than that. However, as the workshop was direct to the public and not corporates, pricing was an immediate barrier. As I observed the competitor strategies, I realized a better method would be lower pricing ($30 USD) but to a large audience of about 100pax. Overall revenue is consistent due to the higher volume of people.

Do your research first before you design your pricing strategy. Understand how the other companies in your niche are pricing their products/services. Compare your product offering with theirs, then decide the pricing strategy that you are most comfortable with.

10. Get your accounting straight

Keep clear accounting of how much you are earning and spending. In business terms, earnings are referred to as revenue, or top-line. Some people only look at their top-line and neglect to keep tabs on their expenditures, which results in high revenue earned but little to no profits. Some others are so obsessed about reducing costs that they just hold back on spending until they earn money.

The important principle is not to spend excessively, while at the same time not scrimping on necessary costs. The question I usually ask myself is this – Does this affect the value I can deliver to my audience? If it gives a significant positive effect, I’ll spend it. If it doesn’t affect that much and cashflow is tight, I wouldn’t go ahead with the spending.

11. Learn from your competitors (allies)

I always see my competitors as allies because they want to achieve same objective as I do, but I’ll just use competitors to make it simple. Your competitors have been in the industry and have acquired their own experience. Hence, chances are there is a good reason behind the strategies they are using now. Identify your biggest competitors, look at what they are doing, and learn from them. In establishing my blog, I’ve picked up different tips from bloggers such as Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina, Leo Babauta, Glen Allsopp, Dragos, and an array of many other blogs. I analyze what are the things they did that moved them to success, and then I adapt those steps to fit me. It has worked great so far and I intend to continue doing so.

12. Focus on value creation

Ultimately people pay for your products or services because they see value in them. So the most important thing is to focus on value creation – creating the most value to your audience. How can you make sure what you are doing provides the highest possible value for your audience?

For my articles, coaching and workshops, I spend a lot of time on them to ensure the audience gets the most value possible. I’ve spent countless late nights working because I wanted my audience to get more value for the experience. On my blog, I’ve trashed a number of articles because I didn’t think they were of good value to readers. Because of that, my audience knows the quality standard with what I produce and they keep coming back for more.

When your audience knows they can expect the best from you, they will regard you as a credible opinion leader, or authority in the field. They will trust your recommendations and your perspectives. This trust is only built through spending a lot of hard work and time to generate genuine value. There is no quick short cut to it.

Further reading:

Creating Value
Making Money With A Purpose
13. Have regular reviews

Review is essential to know how you are doing. In the first 6 months of starting out, it’s especially important to review, especially since you are just starting out and there are many things subjected to change.

I have a weekly review with myself every Saturday morning, where I review my progress in my goals the week before. This helps me know if I’m on track in meeting my targets or off track. If I meet my targets, it’s a sign that I’m doing the right things . If I don’t meet my targets, I’ll understand what went wrong and what I could do better next time. Then from there, I plan out my action plan for the next week to achieve next week’s goals. These weekly goals ladder up to the monthly goals at the end of the month, where I do a monthly review.

Further reading:

Building the Weekly Review Habit
Review Your Goals Weekly
12 Ways to Upgrade Your Weekly Review
The 6 Stages Of A Failure
27 Ways You Can Develop Bounce Back Muscles In Difficult Times
14. Believe In Yourself

Last but not least, believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams, your passion, your goals, your abilities. Believe that if anyone is able to bring these to life, it’s you and no one else. If you don’t have the power to bring them to life, you wouldn’t be able to given the ability to conceive them in your mind. As Napoleon Hill puts it: ìWhat the mind can conceive, it can achieveî. In my journey, I have never once doubted that my dreams would come true. I knew that as long as I put in all my heart and soul into it, it’s a matter of time before things come to fruition.

So move forward with great vigor and belief. As long as you keep at it, you will bring your dreams to life.

Video: Cool New Improvements to Google Docs

Here on GT, we just announced the new improvements to Google Docs a few days ago. Aside from test-driving the newest version of Google Docs, you can also watch a cool little video summarizing the changes the Google Docs team made to one of our favorite collaboration tools.
The main goal of the improvements was to make collaboration in real time a possibility. The major benefit: saving time!

A Short Documentary on Google

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social Media Monitoring Tools - An Overview

View more presentations from Stefan Betzold.

SIX DEGREES OF SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING

A few days ago I posted my thoughts on social media monitoring for market research.One thing that has become apparent to me over the past few months is that there are a lot of folks using social media monitoring tools to listen for brand mentions, but truly they are capable of so much more with a little forethought and planning. Jason Falls recently posted a survey to determine exactly how people are using these tools (take it!) while others seem to be questioning how the tools are used or constructed. One thing is for sure, however–social media monitoring for brand mentions is not a substitute for research. The mere fact that people are talking about your brand means little unless you can really be sure of the context of those conversations, and equally importantly, who isn’ttalking about your brand and why.

Listening to the social web for brand mentions is really just the first “degree” of social media monitoring– a tactical tool for a tactical purpose. To really get the most out of your social media tools, you need to go a few levels deeper–and not all of it can be automated. With that in mind, here are my six degrees of social media monitoring from the consumer insights perspective:

1. Brand Mentions. This is really the lowest common denominator of social media monitoring, but even without going any deeper, monitoring brand mentions allows your customer service reps to go out and solve problems, meet customers and understand their requirements. On a deeper level, monitoring brand mentions over time allows a company to measure their conversational “velocity” and even take a bankshot reading of the effectiveness of a social media awareness campaign by simply measuring the increase (or decrease) in  brand mentions over time. Monitoring for brand mentions also includes monitoring the specifics around those mentions–is someone having a problem with your product? Is someone having a great experience? All of those tactical interactions really fall under the orbit of this first “degree” of social media monitoring.
2. Sentiment. Actually, I’m not a huge believer in sentiment analysis–yet–for two reasons: it isn’t yet as accurate as an intern would be, and even if it were–I’m not even sure what you do with it other than track it over time. There is certainly no correlation I am aware of between brand mentions and sentiment, or even “social media” sentiment andactual sentiment. Taking snapshots of sentiment is a lot like day trading–anecdotal events will “spike” sentiment one way or the other over the short term, and while you should never ignore a crisis, I don’t think you need sentiment analysis to tell you if you’re in trouble. Sentiment analysis over the medium and long term, however, may be a useful metric to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns over time.
3. The competition. Now we are just starting to scratch the surface of social media monitoring for strategic research purposes. Tracking your own brand mentions is only really interesting if you have other benchmarks with which to compare your data. If your mentions are going down while people are talking more about your competition, then you may have a social media awareness problem. But if mentions in your category overall are declining, you have a very different set of issues. Conversations about problems with competitive products are also extraordinarily useful to track, because you make money by solving those problems–whether they are with your products or someone else’s.
4. Direct Consumer Needs. Surrounding all of those conversations about your brand and your competition are specific consumer needs and desires–the context that wraps around the mention. Brand mentions about a car, for instance, are generally wrapped around the features and benefits of those cars. These can be parsed out and coded (by humans, folks–is your goal to automate or to understand?) by category to come up with conversational segments. Once you’ve mastered the first degree of monitoring and you’ve reached out to individuals having problems with your seat belts or Von Flavin valves or whatnot, you are ready to take a more strategic look at all of these issues. One of the dangers of a focus group, for instance, is allowing one or two articulate and persuasive people to run roughshod over the other respondents, leaving the undisciplined observer with a false impression of what the groups were about, or what the mainstream opinions really were. In our first “degree,” above, you solve the problems of the squeaky wheels, but in this stage, you determine whether or not you really have a problem. I talked a lot more about this the other day, but once you have a segmented, coded set of “buckets” that your brand conversations fit into, you can take a more macro- view of the immediate issues and concerns people really have with your product or service beyond the simple fire-fighting stage. This step is work, but well worth it.
5. Indirect Consumer Needs. Once you’ve fought the fires in the first step, and revised your offerings to social media participants based upon the last step, you are ready to steer the ship out into bluer water. Lexus did this when they launched with an extensive market research initiative that went beyond just asking prospective customers how many airbags they wanted. They listened beyond the “car”-focused conversations and really heard what their customers wanted to experience while driving. For the harried, affluent-but-time-starved prospective Lexus customer, that experience had nothing to do with anti-lock brakes, or acceleration or even lower price. Lexus launched their brand on the strength of one word: quiet. By going beyond the four degrees listed above and diving deeper into what the lives of their customers were really like, they determined that the potential Lexus buyer was looking for an oasis from their hectic work and home lives, and what they sold those customers was a quiet, peaceful place to park their tookus while they drove off to the rat race. Advanced social media monitoring is a great way to assess those indirect consumer needs–what else are the people talking about your category talking about? How can you provide the truest definition of value–to delight the customer profitably–by skating to where the puck is going?
6. Social Needs. This is the stuff that really excites me–the macro-level trends of a population that transcend even the previous discussions and look at the disaggregation and re-aggregation of populations around new and ever-changing societal norms. Sociologists know all about Dunbar’s Number, for instance, but what happens when an entire lifegroup or psychographic cluster of people changes the denominator by shifting the definition of “friend?” When generations of children who met locally on the kickball field now meet virtually on the Arathi Basin, what are their social needs? What do their parents need to know? Why are there so many “Tweetups?” Why does Tony Robbins have almost two million followers on Twitter, but the Dalai Lama has ten percent of that? Why does over 1% of the world’s population play Farmville? The seeds of those answers can be found deep within the unstructured data of the social web. And those are the answers that will power the global economy for years to come.

Increase Online Traffic - What NOT To Do by Anita DeFrank

We are always talking about ways to increase search engine traffic. But, what about what we shouldn't do? The following I'll share a few tricks that you shouldn't be doing.

Do Not Buy Traffic

This is one of the oldest scams around the internet. I'm not talking about PPC programs; that's a whole other article. The ones I'm talking about are the ones that 'guarantee you' 10,000 visitors for $10.00 (just an example). Do you really think that's possible? Not only do they try to sell you visits; they also try to say you'll get such and such amount of sales. In plain words…BULL! Besides, there is NO company that can guarantee you any amount of sales. Sales depend on the demand of your product/service, price and of course your ad copy. Plain and simple…Buying traffic is a scam. Don't do it.

Don't Bother with Top Sites

These quickly become a big waste of your valuable time. (Remember, your time is valuable and time IS money.) Everyone else listed there with your site is doing the exact same thing you're doing. Let me guess, every day you are clicking on your link and voting for yourself and/or you are sending out tons of emails (possibly spam) begging all your friends to vote for you. Am I right? Don't waste your precious time doing this. Instead spend your time working on your ad copy. It'll take you much further.

Submitting Your Site Myths

You don't need to submit your site to search engines. Submitting your site to search engines does not increase your search engine rankings. The important search engines will index a properly built website.

Web Rings

Web Rings can be fun but, you very well could be sending your traffic AWAY from your site. You are giving your visitors the opportunity to click away to another site. You need to be concentrating keeping your visitors and selling your product or service. Besides that, a lot of people break the web rings. These rings are set up to be all about the same topics. You are giving your visitors direct links to your competitors.

Don't Spam Your Website

Some webmasters out there have decided to spam their own websites. How do they do this you ask? One way they do this is to place a lot of unrelated keywords into their meta tags and keywords. Another way is to make 'invisible text' on their website by making the text so small that it actually looks like a dot or period. Don't do this. This can easily get you banned from the search engines.

Do Not Participate in Link Farms

What exactly is a Link Farm? A link farm is list of links created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. For example: One page of links is generated and to be listed on this page it is a requirement to place this page on your website. Search engines see this as an illegal move and can have you punished and banned from them. Please don't hesitate to investigate if you have a question about a particular program that you are involved with. It could save you tons later.

One thing that I frequently hear when referring to the above 'programs' is the following: "But, it's free, it's not going to hurt me." First of all, these aren't free. These are a waste of valuable time. As I mentioned Time IS Money and your time is precious. For every moment you are spending on these basically worthless ideas, you COULD be improving your traffic instead. Secondly, a few of the above mentioned are against search engine rules and could get you banned. That is a lot of hurting.