Lately, I have been utterly obsessed with internet marketing and am reading at least 100 pages a day of different books on the subject. One major trend that I am observing is the habit of the internet marketer to be doing exactly what he is telling you to do. This is great in more ways than one.

If the marketer whom you are trying to learn from is using the same tactics he is recommending you the reader to use, and he is successful because of it, the product becomes more reputable. So in a way, the marketer is fulfilling his/her own prophecy.

Will the Trend Continue?

I think that it will. One of the best ways to help your clients is to use the same products and resources that you use. At JPMorgan Chase (where I work as a licensed banker), I recommend my clients do the same things that I do.

I recommend methods for them to fix their credit which I use. I develop plans for them to save money, invest money, and put money away in the best way for retirement, as well as get them in the right mortgage and have emergency funds available to them should something happen.

All of these things help my clients genuinely and I also do the same behaviors myself. I think this is a great testament to the recommendations I make.

How YOU Can Use This Information to Help Build Relationships and Assist Clients at the Same Time.

One of the most valuable things you will ever do as a business owner is establish the right kind of relationships with your customers. For one, if you have speaking relationships with some of your customers they will give you all the answers you need to better market your product or service and how to better help them. This is incredibly valuable.

You may ask, “Well how do I start to develop relationships with my clients?” In my experience the clients view it as great customer service when you follow up with them to see if they received the product or if they liked it and also to check and check on their progress even further down the road.

At Chase, I do this with a phone call most of the time but on the internet an e-mail is perfectly fine. I have also read material that states that a follow up call to an internet customer has intrinsic value. Would you ever expect a customer service call from an internet company you purchased something from? I sure wouldn’t.

Following up with customers is a great way to start building relationships with them.

More on that later. If you liked this article, make sure that you subscribe to my RSS feed. There are big changes to my blog and to my life about to happen and I am going to chronicle them here. A big thanks goes out to all of you who have subscribed to my RSS feed already!

Make sure you check out the Vblog Nate and I are posting later in the week!

For those of you who have been paying attention to the stock market at all, you know that this was not a kind week to traders. According to Yahoo Finance, the Dow was down a total of 4.23 percent.

If you are an investor, this shouldn’t matter a whole lot. I, like most this week, personally felt the hit that the markets took. However, I am not worried. I invest for the long term and so should you!

There are day traders out there that do well. Most of them also spend every waking second researching and trading. I for one, am not willing or able to do this, therefore day trading doesn’t make sense for me. I am more concerned with being profitable in the long run.

As you know, I have a long time before I plan on retiring or needing the majority of my funds. I want my investments to do at least as well as the markets overall and I want to take on less risk achieving that return.

I invest mostly in highly diversified mutual funds in order to accomplish this. These are growth oriented, and I plan on taking advantage of compound interest to build my nest egg. This is by no means the only way to accomplish diversification or you personal investment goals. Before jumping into an investment or contributing to a retirement account, I strongly recommend speaking with a qualified financial planner. One of my favorite and extremely knowledgeable advisors is Art Dinkin. His customer service oriented business is well known in the industry.

Why Significant or Not So Significant Down Turns in the Markets are NOT a Big Deal

If you look back at the history of the stock market, it’s past performance indicates that the markets will go up and down in the short term but over time will increase. Ideally, which has been true in the past, the longer you hold your money in the market, the higher return you earn.

At JPMorgan Chase, where I am a banker, I constantly meet people who have heard horrible stories of individuals losing money in the “stock market,” or they have possibly lost money themselves. There are very logical reasons that this occurred, in most all of the cases I’ve heard.

Here in Arizona, the real estate market has been great over the past 10 years and people often compare the two to me. In reality, people try to buy their houses in a down market and then sell in an up market. Nobody would sell there house in a down market, if possible, right? They know that if they hold on to the home, eventually the housing market will go back up.

When it comes to their investments in the stock market, more often than not, these very same people who would never sell their house in a down market, willingly unload their shares when a stock drops by 4%. Sound familiar?

For some reason, most of those that I speak with about investing, have this stigma that the stack market is an extremely risky investment. I really don’t agree with this and while past performance is no guaranteed indication of future performance, I for one have seen the results that investing with a diversified portfolio for the long term can achieve!

I am encouraging that everyone who has not seen or talked to a financial advisor within the last year to make an appointment with one by the end of next week!

I would enjoy to hear any feedback or experiences you might have had with investing. Please let me hear it!

This is the first linktrain that I have participated in. I have read posts where other bloggers look down upon bloggers participation in linktrains. However, I really want to help and influence others. That being said, the more links, the more traffic, the more assistance to others I can be. Plus, I get to help out other bloggers which I am ALWAYS willing to do. So as my good friend David Wilkinson said:

“Geek Train - All aboard!”

Here is what you should do to get involved…

1 - Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and linkback to the blog(s) that put you on the list in the paragraph. You MUST do this. No-one plans on getting slapped for duplicate content any time soon, do they?

2 - Next, copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your own blog. If you’d like a different keyword for your blog then change it, when you do your post, and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword, provided the train keeps on spreading.

3 - Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.

4 - Add at least three new favourite blogs of yours to keep the train going, e-mail the blog owners (or comment on one of their posts) and insist that they post.

My Adds:

(The overclocker) Shawn Knight
(The incredible) Chris Hooley
(The rhetorical) Michael Kwan
(The talented) Leo Chiang
(The root of all evil) John Chow
(The business dude) Josh Mullineaux
(The brilliant) Shoemoney
(The absurdly loud) Ed Lau
(The mastermind) Jon Waraas
(The yaketty) Stephen Fung
(The wickedly cool) Everton Blair
(The uber blogger) Ms Danielle
(The enterprising) Matt Coddington
(The career minded) Jane May
(The legendary) Gary Lee
(The nifty) Dosh Dosh
(The ambitious) Jeff Kee

(The Satirical Humorist ) Jeff Kee

(The Affiliate Blogger) Craig

(The kick-ass) Nate Whitehill
(The original) 13-Year Old Blogger.
(The money-making) Affiliate Marketing guide.
(The crafty two at) TechRave
(The AdSense ‘dude’) Michael Cheney

This link train is the brainchild of David Wilkinson, hyper, money-making kid, and kick-ass blog designer Nate Whitehill.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post entitled “Why its Okay to Suck Sometimes.” It was mostly about how learning is more important than doing something perfectly, especially when first starting a new venture.

I am a new blogger to the community but as of recently I have been consumed by the blogosphere. Everyone that I have been meeting and conversing with has been great. There is so much fresh content out there that I enjoy. I also like being able to gain insight from people around the world.

Nate Whitehill and I just completed our fist video-cast and I can say that the process was more difficult than I originally thought it would be. Surprisingly, I thought it was more difficult to speak into a camera than it is to give live presentations to a class of 50 people.

Why we did it

Nate and I have been discussing doing pod-casting for a while and had just not gotten around to it due to our time being concentrated on other things. When Mark from 45n5.com shot his video-cast not too long ago, it inspired us to take the risk and go for it.

Video-casts have some pros and cons. Mostly I wanted to do it as a way for my readers and potential readers to get to know me even better. It will hopefully communicate my intentions and also get the attention of some readers that I previously have not connected with. The con is that the video-cast is not as well executed, as the ones in the future will be. With much practice will come much improvement (I hope).

Topics We Covered

I have not personally participated in any form of guest blogging or guest posting. Nate, however has. We both see the value in it but as I say in the video I think there is a time and place for it. Mark from 45n5.com had a good point when he said that he doesn’t like to read other people’s blogs when he isn’t able to read work by the author. Most of the time I want to read blog posts written by the author of the blog. However, I believe that having a new post on your blog written by someone else every once in a while, is not a bad thing. Especially when you (the author) otherwise would not have posted that day. Also, if you are a more experienced blogger, you can give new bloggers a chance to get there name in front of an audience they haven’t connected with previously.

Risk taking is something that both Nate and I have written about in the past and believe strongly in it. We cover this topic on the video-cast and you can read more about risk taking in my previous post titled, “Calculated Risk Taking, What the Ultra Successful do that Most Don’t.”

Our Request

We hope that by posting a first time video cast, it will inspire others to try it out. It is not a perfect product yet by any means but we plan on doing one at least once a week from now on. Hopefully we will see a dramatic improvement. So please, take this chance to differentiate yourself and respond to our cast.

Our Offer

If you fulfill our request of either writing about our video-cast or posting your own video, we will post a link to you in our blogs. Nate’s blog has a Google page rank of 5 and is adequately established. My blog, once Google releases the latest page rank will hopefully be a PR of 4. We believe this is a great opportunity to get to know others on the Internet and gain needed exposure as well.

-I hope to see all of you do your own video-cast soon!

My blog focuses on three main topics; personal finance, personal development, and business development. My goal with my blog is for it to be as useful as a tool as anything else on the web. In order to achieve this goal I NEED YOUR HELP!

I am a marketer through and through. Marketers believe in focusing on the customer’s demands first. I am seeking the opinions of my readers and potential readers alike. In a recent post by Darren Rowse at problogger.net, he explains the value in figuring out what your readers are looking for. I want to know exactly what you want to read about and what subjects will help you in your lives.

Personal Finance

Personal finance is a very important aspect of us all being able to live happy and successful lives. We all know how stressful it can be to live paycheck to paycheck. I have been working for JPMorgan for almost a year now and part of my job involves educating people on personal finance matters. My question to you is; what do you want to learn more about?

This is a serious question. I think that it is only right that I share my experiences and knowledge to better the lives of those around me, especially my readers and potential readers.

Personal Development

Personal development means different things to different people. How the phrase relates to people has a lot to do with what the persons’ goals and aspirations are. I might get a lot of different responses here but that is okay. I will do my best to answer them all.

Personal development to me is figuring out exactly how I am going to grow into the person that I need to be in order to accomplish my short and long term goals.

This can involve everything from exercise and diet, to research and networking. My business partners just wrote fantastic posts about these two topics and I suggest you read them if you haven’t already. Matt Blancarte wrote about keeping yourself motivated and on track through a 12 hour work day, and Nate Whitehill wrote about the importance of networking online.

What would you like to read more about on the subject of personal development. I have written several posts on the subject but I am very curious to know what you would like to read more about. Think about things you struggle with and I will relate ways that have helped me get over obstacles in my life.

Business Development

Right now I am in the middle of developing several businesses. I would be more than happy to answer any questions regarding this. Struggles I have had to overcome, how to plan, etc. What are some of the questions you have? This is a very popular topic in the blogosphere but I have a unique perspective and would like to know what you would like to read more about.

The most important thing here is that I keep my blog useful. I don’t want to have a blog that doesn’t help people everyday. Without feedback from you I will never be as useful as I could be. Please take a couple of seconds and tell me what you would like to read more about on all or any of the three subjects I mentioned above.