Farewell to a hero
By Teresa MaskDaily Herald Staff WriterA portrait of a vibrant, healthy Walter Payton wearing his Bears uniform and white headband stared out at his family and close friends who came to say their final goodbyes to the football great Friday.
The invitation-only memorial service in a Barrington Hills church was a celebration of Payton's life, told through stories, laughter and song.
Those who paid tribute to him during the ceremony recalled their favorite memories of Payton. For his son, Jarrett, it was his father's whistle.
No matter where he was, he could always hear that whistle. He would hear it when he was in the yard goofing off or as he was leaving the football field after a game.
He understood that his father was saying: "Represent me well." "Many of you knew my father as a football player and as a business man," said 18-year-old Jarrett, who offered one of five tributes during the emotional two-hour service. "I knew him as my dad - and he was my hero." "My mother, my sister and I will miss him ... but we know he's in a place where there's no sickness, no pain."
Payton died Monday at his South Barrington home from bile duct cancer after also battling a rare liver disease. He was 45. The altar at the Life Changers International Church in Barrington Hills was awash in flowers, many of them orange.
One arrangement formed the "34" that Payton wore first in college and then with the Bears. Payton's body was cremated, and his ashes were in a vase on the altar.
A public memorial service begins at noon today at Soldier Field. Thousands are expected to bid farewell to the 13-year veteran of the Bears.
A final memorial ceremony is expected to be held Monday in Mississippi, Payton's birthplace. Former Bears Coach Mike Ditka joined nearly 1,000 people at Friday's service.
"Walter was a compassionate, loving, caring, sharing individual," Ditka said after the ceremony. "When you think about that, you got to celebrate a person's life. Yeah, it isn't fair. Forty-five years on this Earth, you should be in the prime of your life. But I think it warns us that tomorrow is not promised."
Ditka, Payton's brother Eddie, former teammate Mike Singletary and sportscaster John Madden spoke during the two-hour ceremony.
The guest list ranged from Gov. George Ryan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to about 100 current and former football players, coaches and scouts who also attended the services. Among them were Marcus Allen and Bears great Gale Sayers.
Members of the Bears' Super Bowl-winning team said Payton inspired them all.
"He had great leadership, unspoken leadership most of the time," said former wide receiver Willie Gault. "He led by example on and off the field. He was just an incredible guy.
"He hugged a lot," Gault said. "And he hugged really tight so you often could hear your bones crack."
And at one time or another, Gault said, everyone was victim to a Payton prank.
"He would lock you out of the bathroom or the showers or turn the hot water on when you were washing your hair," he said.
Payton, who joined the Bears in 1975 out of Jackson State, rushed for 16,726 yards and led Chicago to its only Super Bowl victory after the 1985 season. He was known as "Sweetness" to his fans. During the ceremony, Payton's family wore white buttons with the nickname on it. Guests were asked to wear miniature yellow silk roses in honor of Payton.
Outside the church, 10 American flags flew at half-staff, while a flag with the number 34, and another with the Chicago Bears logo, flew high.
They appeared to symbolized the pinnacle Payton reached in his football career.
"Walter Payton was the greatest football player that ever lived," Madden said. "He could run, catch, tackle. He did all those things better than anyone else."
Madden said he plans to suggest to the NFL that they make a video and a book titled, "How to be like Walter" and give it to every new player who comes into the league. Madden said it would teach them all to be pros.
Meanwhile, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said the league may consider naming the Player of the Year after Walter Payton. The way Payton lived was remarkable, friends said. The courage with which he faced his death was just as commendable.
"Walter didn't care about how important he was," said Revie Sorey, the big Bears lineman who blocked for Payton. "He lived 45 years, and he touched more people than we know. Walter has given us the best wake-up call ever. He died with toughness, so he is making us tough. The benchmark was raised a couple of notches when God made Walter."

Are you and affiliate? Or maybe you’re looking to become one. Did you know that being and affiliate you can earn hundreds even thousands of dollars each and ever month promoting other peoples affiliate products! Well its true, and I am going to tell you 3 simple yet easy to follow steps on how to sell affiliate products. If you follow my three easy steps there is no doubt in my mind you wont make money. So grab a pen and have a seat, and get ready to write this down!

Step 1. First you must find a product to promote. Some of the top selling affiliate products are Affiliate Cash Vault, Easy Chair Millionaire, and Beating Adwords. These are the top 3 things to promote. All three of them are also a very good resource to use, and help you make money. As with everything you promote I recommend you purchase the programs so you can get to know more about them. This will help make it even easier to sell them. But that is up to you. Once you have joined these top three programs now you are reading to move on to the next step.

Step 2. Now it is time to start promoting. First there is free marketing, and they there is paid marketing. To sell affiliate products with free marketing you want to start out by writing in the free classified ads. Do a google search for "free classified ads" and you will gets tons of them. I like to use usfreeads myself. Some of them may require that you sign up. Others you can just post your ad right away. Another great free marketing method is article writing. Write articles on the three programs I showed you above. Write reviews on them, and submit your articles to places like go articles, buzzle, articlealley. Those are just a few of the places you can submit to.

Step 3. PPC (pay per click). Once you have made a few sales, and can invest a little money into advertising you should start up and google adwords account. This is going to be the best traffic you can get. Before you start though do some more research on your affiliate program, and find out what keywords sell it. Once you have a few keywords add them, and set a price. Then have your adds go to the affiliate products you’re promoting. Following these three easy to use systems you now know how to sell affiliate products. So go out there, and have some fun making money. Chris Rohrer makes over $3,000 a month working at home. For more information on how you too can start making money online visit Affiliate Cash Vault.
By chris rohrer

Google's advice for your website: Content

Google's advice for your website: Content
The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what is read on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing.

Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point? Apparently not.


Most common on-page website content success features
Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on 27 June 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

Updating: Frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.
Spelling and grammar: Few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as mis-spellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? Keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.
Paragraphs: Primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
Lists: Both bulleted and numbered form a large part of the text.
Sentence length: Mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.
Contextual relevance: Text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.



SEO bugbears and sacred cows
A hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content:
PageRank: The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.
Frames: The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.
JavaScript-formatted internal links: Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.
Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contained over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about ‘link popularity bleeding’. Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links out-numbered relevant ones.
Originality: A significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note that the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.


Recommendations
Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content. Most visitors simply hit the back button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.
If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copywriter before going online.
Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.
Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a ‘duplicate content penalty’ for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.


Conclusion
In short, if you have a mature website that's already indexed and getting traffic, you should make sure most of your investment is devoted to content. This seems to be preferable to graphic design, old-school search-engine optimisation, or linking campaigns.

Using Auto Responder

When it comes to making a sell using your autoresponder, follow up messages are very important. Most website visiters
won’t buy something on the first visit; it normally takes more than 6 or 7 visits before they decide to make a purchase. To keep them interested and eventually make the sale, you’ll need to come up with some innovative yet captivating follow up messages.
When you start writing your message, you’ll need to come up with compelling headlines. Compelling headlines will draw attention from readers, making them feel excited to read the rest of your message. If you send a message with a shoddy headline, chances are that your readers will just glance over the email and not pay much attention to it at all.
You can also grab attention from your readers by sending them personalized messages with their names and other details. There are several autoresponders that personalize messages through the insertion of codes. When you send a message out, the code is replaced with the personal information of the subscriber. When receiving the email, the reader will see his or her personal information instead of the code.
The first message that you send out is normally an introduction message. This message should be geared towards giving readers what to expect from your messages. You can also mention information about your company and your products as well. Your introduction message is very important, as it sets the pace for the messages that follow.
When you send out your second message, you should inform readers about your products and services. Make sure that you explain what your products do and how your readers can benefit from using them. Then, in the messages that follow, you should put added emphasis on your services and products. You should be trying to convince readers that they simply must have your products and that your products are a cut above the rest.
To ensure that you get a sale, you should include comparisons between what you offer and what competitors offer. This way, you’ll show potential customers that you are indeed the best, with the best features and the best prices. Once you have a few satisfied customers, you’ll start to build up your credibility. If a customer is satisfied, he will let you and others know. Once a customer has praised your products, you can add it to a testimonial and send it out in a future follow up message.
When you end a message, make sure that you leave a teaser for the next message. This way, your customers will look forward to receiving your next message. You should also carefully weave in messages regarding your contact and order information as well, so readers can place an order without any problems. If you put some time and thought into your follow up messages – you’ll start racking up customers and sales in no time at all.

Economic Disaster! Are You Next?

The human costs of the U. S. financial crisis are coming into clear focus. Family members lose their jobs, then their homes, and the cascade of ruin begins in earnest. Health problems are ignored, anxiety and depression increase, and domestic violence is more common. Many are on the edge, anticipating their worst fears: losing their home or apartment then struggling to find the next meal. The biggest issues right now are about basic needs — food and shelter.
There’s a rational, reasonably immediate solution to a good part of the economic disaster. The banks won’t like it but you will. But first the sad facts.
There were 2.3 million default notices to homeowners in 2008, up 80% over 2007. It will be worse in 2009 with Option ARMs coming due (those favorites of Alan Greenspan).
Typically the nation’s economic leader, California, saw foreclosures increase by 160% in 2008. As a result three percent of California homes, 240,000 in all, became bank properties. These are the same banks that slithered up to the bar and demanded a double shot of the new elixir for failed financial institutions, federal bailouts. Put it on the tab.
To understand the full extent of the economic collapse, consider this. The current official unemployment rate is 7.2%. This includes those out of a job who have actively sought employment in the past four weeks. But this figure understates the level of economic distress. There are 1.9 million unemployed “marginally attached” workers not counted and 8.0 million underemployed workers seeking full time employment.
The total unemployed and under employed figure is 21 million U.S. workers.
Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina are facing hard times similar to those in California. Your state is next. It’s a nationwide phenomenon.
Despite hundreds of billions in giveaways to the banks, there are no reports of a single U.S. citizen or family receiving a bailout from Washington to help them stay in their home.
What happens when you’re thrown out of your home or apartment and you have no job?
To begin with, you’re poor.
You can live on the street, move in with relatives, or seek to rent a home or an apartment. After a foreclosure, your credit rating will probably disqualify you from most opportunities at the outset. If you’re in a warmer climate, you can live in a tent city which began springing up across the country last September.
You can and will enter an entirely new world where you’re exposed to a variety of risks that will make it very difficult to put your life back together again. Crime, infectious diseases, underpayment for work, and increasing social isolation are routine.
You can become a crime victim. In your new world, that of the poor, you will find that you’re among the group with the majority of violent crime victims.
You can seek and receive occasional “subprime” medical care in hospital emergency rooms. But the days of serious attention to an ongoing condition, arthritis for example, are over for you.
You can watch your life melt away and your family suffer, all without the prospect of any real assistance. Homeless shelters are full in most places. Public health programs have been overflowing for years. The “welfare state” simply doesn’t exist. You’re screwed.
Wall Street welfare was supposed to save us from all of this according to the Bush-Cheney scam artists. Those two and their henchmen doubled the national debt in just a few short years of concentrated looting. Somehow, the most recent Wall Street donations were supposed to secure failed financial institutions and generate a stimulus for the economy. No deal.
To add insult to that injury, a $140 billion tax cut for banks was written “into law” by a Treasury Department bureaucrat, a move that everyone consulted said was clearly illegal. Nothing was done about it. In fact, a key congressional staffer explained it this way: “We’re all nervous about saying that this was illegal because of our fears about the marketplace.” (Nov. 10, 2008)
Crime pays. Deception pays.
But the money to pay working people isn’t there thanks to the financial manipulations that made the very wealthy even wealthier and left the rest with little to nothing in return. There is no room at this inn for people who need a helping hand.
When Do the People Collect?
California passed a law that cut into foreclosures by requiring that the banks actually give a reasonable notice of default prior to tossing families onto the street. This program had an impact for a few months but foreclosures bounced back and kept growing.
Representative Marcy Kaptur, (D-OH), responded to the economic collapse of Toledo, Ohio (11% unemployment) with a sensible idea. Foreclosures and evictions are a commonplace event. Kaptur tells citizens to stay put, don’t leave your home if a foreclosure notice is issued. “Produce the Paper” is the theme. Due to the complexity of many bad loans, it can be very difficult to figure out which bank actually holds the mortgage or to even find a true loan document. Without that information, there are legal challenges that can force banks to delay or forgo eviction.
Time for a Nationwide “Cramdown”
The easiest solution, the most immediate, is a cramdown. What’s that?
In bankruptcy court, a judge can take the total amount of a mortgage and divide it into two parts. The appraised home value becomes the “secured claim” and “the amount over the current appraised home value” becomes the “unsecured claim.” The unsecured amount is discarded. The secured amount, i.e., current appraised value, becomes the homeowner’s only debt. This debt can be amortized over the life of the loan. Thus monthly payments go down, people have a much better chance of staying in their homes, and they have some disposable income for essentials. (see here)
Congressional Democrats and President Obama are arguing over legislation that would give bankruptcy judges greater options for “cramdowns.” Both sides of the argument are out of touch with the accelerating harsh realities of the U.S. economy as experienced directly by the citizens.
There’s no court that needs to hear this case. The nationwide cramdown should be negotiated directly by the Obama administration, in behalf of all citizens and the remaining banks. Obama’s two financial system insiders, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers, would all of sudden become the good cop/bad cop negotiators shoving the banks in a corner and forcing them so submit to the plan.
Cramdowns were mentioned in the campaign as one of several options to address the needs of homeowners. Obama can resist the idea and those in Congress can ignore the scope of action needed. But the people will bring them back to reality very soon, just as they did on the specific issue of having someone in the cabinet so rich and aloof that he forgets to pay $126,000 in income taxes.
Meeting the urgent need for people to have a home means less social and economic disruption. There would be an immediate stimulus with more money available to spend in the real economy. This stimulus program would put money back in the economy in months not years.
Now is the time.

Ethanol vs Food Prices

Perry request ignites ethanol debate
By The Editorial Board Monday, April 28, 2008, 05:14 PM
When Gov. Rick Perry last week asked the federal government to reduce its mandate for higher percentages of ethanol in gasoline he joined a national conversation about ethanol that this country needs to have.
Congress and the White House have been pushing hard for more fuel to be produced from grain crops, particularly corn. Federal subsidies have helped enrich corn growers and ethanol producers, but at the expense of food supplies, energy savings and lower levels of pollution.
In his letter to the Environmental Protection Agency, Perry asked for a waiver from the requirement that more biofuels be added to the gasoline supply. Perry said the mandate is artificially raising food prices and damaging the economy.
Perry isn’t the only one saying that. Corn prices have tripled in two years, from $2 to nearly $6 a bushel, as more growers sell it to produce ethanol. Many experts blame that conversion of a food crop to a fuel source for food shortages around the world.
The drive for more ethanol in our fuel supply has had other negative effects as well. It takes more energy to produce ethanol than the ethanol produces; adding to the corn crop requires more energy and produces more pollution; a vehicle running on gasoline mixed with ethanol gets worse mileage than one running on gasoline alone.
Recently, the World Bank blamed the rush to biofuels as a factor in the high food prices that threaten the poor nations of the world. Some economists believe the higher prices for grain will be a huge burden on the U.S. economy, too.
Diverting the corn crop from food uses has had an enormous ripple effect. Corn is the basic ingredient in feed for cattle and poultry, so the high cost will drive up the expense of meat, too. It is a vicious cycle that many people didn’t foresee when the Renewable Fuel Standard was adopted last year.
The situation could get worse if the mandate remains; in two years 30 percent of the corn crop will be used to produce ethanol.
Corn growers, of course, like the current situation. Ethanol has been a bumper crop for them. But the backlash from the effort to find an effective alternative to gasoline has taken this country by surprise. Ethanol has not lowered the price of gasoline, which continues to rise, but has raised the price of corn - and has had a deleterious effect on the food supply.
Perry may not get the waiver he is seeking to reduce the renewable fuel mandate by half, but his request intensified a growing debate over the nation’s ethanol policy. That policy is looking more and more like an enormous and potentially tragic blunder.

Marketing Tips

Marketing Article: 7 Key Marketing Strategies & Marketing Tips to Help Your Business Thrive How do you grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you've identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture. While not all inclusive, the following list of priorities, marketing strategies, marketing tools, and small business marketing tips can help establish a marketing framework that can put your small business on a faster track to growth. NOTE: Consider downloading the Small Business Marketing Bible to get access to an expanded, detailed list of powerful marketing tactics, marketing tools, and business-building marketing strategies. Small Business Marketing Strategy

#1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It's up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or added value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence. If you haven't clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they'll be hesitant to commit and the sale will go to your competitor. Business Marketing Strategy

#2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target audience to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible(frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible. By the way, if direct mail is one of the ways you intend on reaching prospective customers, DCMG.com can provide you with a direct mail list that will put your message in the hands of targeted prospects. It's a technique that continues to work for companies of all sizes. Marketing Strategy

#3: Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I'm not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility and perceived professionalism.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you. Small Business Marketing Strategy

#4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales and marketing process as focusing attention on product features and benefits. Business Marketing Strategy

#5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations. Marketing Strategy

#6: Impose a deadline.Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendancy to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now. Business Marketing Strategy

#7: Create a small business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing tools that you need to research or acquire.