If a  modern version of the famous Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People were to appear, I am sure it would have a chapter on how to use your email list properly.

Some years ago, when I was still running my restaurant, I used to play the market. It was more or less a hobby, not a big time endeavor, but there was not one single year in which I didn't have some taxable income from that activity. The whole thing really boils down to establishing some kind of system and following it without letting your emotions influence the moves you make. But that's a subject for another post, which I will probably not be writing for a long time.

Anyone who is in the stock market has heard of Jim Cramer, his Mad Money TV show and his web site, 'thestreet.com'. Years ago, this guy used to be a sports coach somewhere and ended up becoming very well known in the Wall Street circles. He is one of today's gurus in stock market investing.

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This should be enough to shut down several government agencies, including but not limited to the EPA, the FDA, the USDA, and start over.

The Letter Written in the Year 2070 has been circulating since 2002, when it was first published. I just learned about it by chance, a couple of weeks ago, when someone emailed it to me. But I couldn't find an English version anywhere, so I did a translation.

This, you MUST see – and spread it around as much as possible. Just go to this page on my web site.

Some may think it's bullshit or a scare tactic. But it's a possibility. Don't miss it.

I am sure many of you have heard about Robert Ringer. Briefly, he is one of today's Personal Development gurus. I first learned about him in the mid-70s, when he released his first hit, self-published, Winning Through Intimidation, and shortly thereafter a second one, Looking Out for Number One. In those days, I was a green real estate broker, and I put to use many things I learned from those two books, which I read more that once, mostly because they were hilarious.

Ringer's writing style has changed a lot over the years – now it s much more conservative, in fact, a little too serious for me, but, never forgetting his two early works, I always read his subsequent stuff as soon as I found out about it. When I started seeing some of his articles in Early to Rise (ETR), I subscribed to a weekly thing of his called A Voice of Sanity in an Insane World, a nice motivational/business letter.

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Here is the inspiration for this post's title:

I always thought "Federal Drug Administration" was a misnomer. Boy, was I wrong! These bastards' only concern is actually drugs. They want nothing to do with the good things we can ingest, like natural foods and supplements, vitamins, herbs and such, except when it comes to prevent access to these good things.

You can get in a heap of trouble by promoting the benefits of healthy natural products. Yet, our government (not just the FDA, and not just the Feds) allows – no, promotes – mislabeling. One shameless example: the new rules of the Almond Board of California, with the blessing of the USDA, mandating the pasteurization of all commercially grown almonds, yet allowing those poisoned almonds to be labeled as "raw".

Things like this have prompted me to add a new section to the Timos site, which will be dedicated to the environment and other related subjects. I have started by presenting a series of hilarious cartoons. They are very humorous, but touch on a subject that is very serious; if you are at all concerned about our poor abused planet or about your health, you will want to look at these – just go to the site and take a look at the "Green Earth" section.

The Timos site is now bilingual (English-Spanish), so those viewing it in Spanish will look at "Tierra Verde". The list of all the cartoons is here: timos.com/timos/green/cartoonList.cfm.

Enjoy! More on this soon.

Note: This comic by Mike Adams – and the other 80+ - appear on Timos site, courtesy of NaturalNews.com, the Internet's best e-zine about the environment and a green earth. The original, in its full size is here.

"The shocking truth REVEALED ... Google is digging its own grave as we speak"

BULLSHIT!!

I am sure a lot of you have heard the buzz this past week, about this fantastic, you-would-be-stupid-to-be-without $2 report. You might as well close your business now.

I had never heard about Simon Leung until about a week ago. I googled his name and apparently, the man, in his capacity as a Google ex-employee, does have a lot of knowledge about the search engine's products and the way they operate. Also it looks like he is a sharp businessman and is well known in the Internet Marketing circles.

The truth is on the last page of the $2 report:

"Ultimately, AdWords is NOT the one facing death – your business is. And the only way to prevent a thorough analysis on the autopsy table of its cause of death is to avoid being unprepared when the world ends"

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SEO and PPC are absolutely what to do to make money with a web site.

I am not going to give you a discourse about what these things are: I am by no means an expert – yet – but I'm getting there. Instead, I will tell you how to get started, some of the things I myself have done so far:

Google the term 'SEO'; one of the top results will be Wikipedia – read that. Then go to the Google site and read about their advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense – not exactly the most exciting reading, but this is where you find out what you are getting into.

Before you go wild, sign up with Google and start maxing out your credit card, get a little education about these things, much of which will be free. Here are the people you want to hook up with:

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As I said in my previous post, I only became involved with this a little over two months ago. It's been a hell of a ride, and, although I am learning fast, I am by no means an expert. But I think I have learned enough to offer a few pointers.

"Stay home with the kids and get your share of this $60 billion market – Take surveys and make $20 - $120 per hour. You don't have to know anything and you can work any hours and times you want, fire your boss, sit on your ass on the beach in some Caribbean island, work a couple of hours a week and make a six-figure monthly income, blah, blah...., just send me your $nn7 and start making money 90 minutes from now". It seems like the prices of all the programs nowadays end in '7' – most popular are $97 and $197, they can go up to $1997 of more, and a couple of days ago I got an email about the latest, hottest one for $7.

Sound familiar? If you believe any of it, having lived in the San Francisco Bay area for the last 40+ years, I know of a couple of beautiful bridges you can buy real cheap; just send me your $27 and you will see exactly how in 30 seconds. Right!

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Doing a bunch of translations for one of my web sites, then getting involved with Pay-per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) kept me from doing any new posts for the last 2 -3 months. The latter has prompted me to create a new subject for this blog, SEO and PPC.

This has been an interesting, intense ride. In this and the following one or two posts, I will be describing the experience. Hopefully, this will be of help to those who want to get started in SEO or PPC, may be give you some ideas about what and what not to do.

I want to make one thing clear: what you will read here are strictly my personal, not necessarily unbiased opinions. Nothing is based on formal or scientific research – take it like any other commentary you may see from any member of the public who is just thinking outloud. I do not know or have any connection with any of the authors, gurus, whatever-you-want-to-call-them, whose names I may mention or whose products I am using.

SEO is something I should have started doing a long time ago – and indeed something all of us who run web sites should always do (this is assuming that we want people to visit our sites for whatever reason: to share knowledge, the pride and satisfaction of being recognized as an authority on something, to make money selling products or services, etc.). And, as I have learned recently, PPC, especially with Google, is the way to go if you want to bring traffic to your site quickly, while your SEO efforts come to fruition, which takes time (we are talking months, even years).

This all started fortuitously towards the end of July 2007, when I finally decided to get off my ass and start working on finding some way to make money online – taking a break from playing around with Flex, which has been a lot of fun, but not shown any financial or practical results.

I had seen, many times, those ubiquitous "Ads by Google", clean, in good taste; I went to the Google site to take a look at their advertising programs, and learned a little about AdWords and AdSense. But the web site and the help section written by engineers is not exactly enthralling reading, so I ended up at amazon.com in search of books on the subject.

When it comes to technical books, I try to choose from the most recently published ones. Internet and web technologies are changing so fast that a book published six months prior to purchase may already be obsolete when you start reading it.

Three days after my visit to Amazon, I received two books:

Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall. This is one of the best books I have aver read, bar none. I have read the whole thing three - four times. If you really make it a point to go through this book seriously, pay close attention to the material you will find in it, you will become proficient fast and be able to pass on a lot of programs you will soon find out there, purporting to help you in this endeavor. Perry Marshall is a true professional who gives you stuff that is really relevant and useful. He is one of a very small group of people that I recommend getting involved with in this business – more on that in a soon-to-follow post.

The AdSense Code by Joel Comm. A piece of self-serving crap, put together half way (doesn't even have an index). Don't waste your time or money.

Back soon.

Hello there – long time no see.

For the last couple of months, I have been doing a lot of "writing", but not the usual kind. I have been translating articles from English to Spanish. They are now published on my web site at http://www.dircolombia.com/dc/sda/sda.cfm.

The purpose of that site is to connect the US public with the Colombian community both here and in Colombia, mostly for business-related issues (a lot of you know that Colombia is my native country).

Most people, even those who don't speak Spanish, have heard the adage "Salud, dinero y amor" – "Health, wealth and love". I recently started a new section of the site, using the adage as the section's title. That's what the 'sda' in the URL stands for.

The idea is to present material on those three subjects. So far, all but one of the articles come from 'Early to Rise' (ETR), which publishes the best daily email letter I have ever seen – I have been reading it daily for the last 3+ years. The stuff in that letter is excellent. You might want to check out at least some of the articles. If you do, you will find a link at the bottom of each one, where you can subscribe to the newsletter directly with ETR, if you wish.

So, it looks like I'll now be able to get back to creating new posts for this blog, especially about my favorite subject, FOOD/CUISINE.

See you soon,

Carlos (Timo)

I have not yet had to create a site for an Intranet - or something that may be seen by visitors in only one locale/language. So even though I don't work on enterprise-level projects, everything I do goes on the big network (www) and whatever I do from here on will be global, even if it's in only one language, say English.

Even a small project for a local business can be seen by everyone because the big network is all over the place. But not everyone speaks English. I speak Spanish, which makes me a member of a huge community right here in the U.S.A. (there are more Hispanics – 39 million as of June 2003, said USA Today - in this country than there are Canadians in Canada).

So, if I have a product or service to offer, wouldn't it be foolish to limit my potential customers by ignoring that group? A lot of them are going to run into my web site anyway and it would be good if they can all read what I have to say, no?

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