Rated #3 in Boston area for business consultant / marketing

Personal Review of Thumbtack.com

Business Plan Consulting Boston I have been so busy lately I have yet to get the chance to share with you a recent award of sorts I have been honored to receive from Thumbtack.com To see the page posted by Thumbtack Click Here Or click the badge in the right sidebar of the page.

Or check out the Thumbtack business planner
So I thought the least I could do is share a post about their website and what it means to me and what it can mean for your business. I have been a member of Thumbtack for I would say at least a year. If you know me you know that my business has only been around for just over a year. I hope that there will be a number of new readers that don’t know me and I have the pleasure of meeting you via blog posts and comments. I was a bit leary of joining thumbtack when I found it because I have been burned by a site in the past that claims to build your reputation and the only thinkg I got was a bunch of spam to my facebook friends and it was a nightmare. So through some research I made the choice to join and I am so glad I did. I started with the free membership and found the site very easy to use and connect with others. There were all types of business owners listed on their members page and I had hoped it would help my new business reach more people. Well it has prooved to be a smart choice and I’m very pleased with the amount of feedback and reception I have got from my free profile on Thumbtack. I would recommend anyone that has a btutisiness to set up an account and reap the benefits of being a member. It took some time but I am now getting leads from them and look forward to many more!

Thank you www.thumbtack.com
Chris Picanzo “Owner of Flipit4u Marketing”

About Flipit4u Marketing

Flipit4u Marketing uses unique methods designed to get your business positioned in local search so your business is at the top of a Google Search Results Page. There are lot’s of agencies out there that claim they will drive business to your business or website so please do some homework and research the people you deal with. I am a self motivated individual with the ability to apply what I know in the world of search engines and social media to get you results. I have a list of happy clients all of which can be verified and called for a reference. I am able to save you and your business money because I have my own business and everything I do is done by me, no employees and no overhead that you end up paying for with other companies. A lot of other marketing businesses will use automated techniques that do not work,, google is constantly changing and implementing things to prevent people from manipulating search results. Flipit4u does everything the natural way for maximum exposure. I am proud to be able to work closely with all of my clients to make sure we are all on the same page, the first page of Google
I am dedicated to what I do and you can rest assured you will be taken care of throughout the process weather I set your business up and hand it over for you to keep up or if I can maintain the management of your new business listings. The worst thing you can do for your business is “Nothing” and just hope that you will be found.

Ebook Product Creation is now a breeze

I wanted to share this awesome product with you because I use it myself and have found it to be the best training available today! If you ever wanted to create your own ebook or product but thought that there was too much to know and it can only be done if you know your way around the marketing world and have to be an expert in HTML or Code this and that. Well Now it is SIMPLE! Here is an actual review from other customers that see the value in The Speedy Profit Creator. Please Read on if you ever wanted to do it yourself and get published on Amazon or any other site for that matter.

Straightforward and right to the point… Speedy Profit Creator is the bomb. This thing is absolutely jampacked with content and not fluff. There are several components that make up speedy profit creator and every single one is worth its weight in gold. For starters there’s a free report, and this is a great place to start if you just want to get your feet wet before you dive in and make a decision on purchasing the product. Not that this purchase requires a family meeting or anything I mean it’s only five bucks! The free report is called the five-step jumpstart it to 15 page PDF that basically walks you through how to create a lean magnet to attract prospects into your business. The report comes with a video tutorial that actually shows you what to do. To add even more value they throw in two additional videos to teach you how to build a proper squeeze page drive traffic and monetize your lead magnet… Absolutely free they just ask that you spread the word on Facebook or twitter to return the favor.

So here’s what you get for five bucks, first of all the five dollar price is on the WSO offer. I’m pretty sure this thing sells for a lot more on the regular sales page so make sure you buy it through the WSO link so you can save some money. The basic offer gets you an entry-level membership to the site where you have access to all the promo tools so you can promote a product obviously the free report and the jumpstart videos plus the e-book and audio course. The e-book is 40 pages of instructional content packed with resource links. Most of the links are two pretty cool online websites that provide a free alternative to expensive software when it comes to creating digital products. There’s also links in there to some paid stuff and I can totally understand why they included these because they are truly helpful things and some pretty good deals too.

The e-book is very nicely produced and you can tell that this isn’t just something that got slapped together in 15 min. to try and bait people into a bigger one time offer or something like that. From the graphics of the layout this thing is first class with built-in internal navigation links and the works. There are seven sections to the e-book which cover:

Creating the plan
Selecting a product
Domain hosting
Modifying an existing PLR product
Creating a product from scratch
Creating graphics
Creating a sales page
Driving traffic

The e-book is very concise and my favorite part is that it comes with a very well produced audio version where each one of the chapters is a downloadable MP3 file that you can put on your iPod or on your desktop for later. You can also just click the play button for each chapter and listen to it right on the website so these are pretty neat features.

As a basic member you also have access to the resources page which are basically offers two similar products and there’s also a non-advertised free bonus in there which is totally free and I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to mention what it is here but trust me it’s at least a $20 value and you’re gonna love it if you’re into private label rights products and product creation.

They also offer a $27 membership which is called the “pro member” I can’t stress how much this is worth the investment of an extra for $22. As a matter fact you should just go ahead and grab the Pro membership right from the jump because I assure you you’re gonna love this. They give you a PLR product library of 40 pre-created, in demand products that you can claim authorship on right away. And on top of that, you get 10 full-length videos that teach you exactly how to modify the PLR make it unique and create an entire sales funnel from scratch. They even give you the sales page templates and everything you need right there in the members area. So you literally have 40 products of your own to sell right away. Your own product catalog back and start making you money whenever you want and it only cost you $27!

Now if you’re really serious about your Internet business and you want to pop out your own information products often (which we all know is the way to keep the money coming in while you sleep) then you are definitely going to want to spring the extra 40 bucks and get the Mac daddy membership. For $67 you get everything I mentioned above and they also give you unlimited access to the product creation software for life. The software is basically a digital information products creation tool. You can easily make e-books and reports that look really really good by filling in the boxes with your own information and clicking the render button. So this is gonna save you a huge amount of time and you’re not have to fumble around with Microsoft Word or any kind of text editing software to create fancy looking e-books. It’s all right there, and it comes with the PDF manual and video tutorial to teach you how to use the software. But you probably won’t need the manual as this thing is dropdead easy to use.

As a Mac daddy member they also give you resell rights to speedy profit creator. Now you can sell the entire thing but as a reseller they let you sell the basic version and they supply the website, the sales video and everything you need to be up and running.

Inside the site you’ll also see offers for mentorship, done for you service and another product called my unfair advantage created by the same author whose name is Omar Martin. If you do some research on this guy and his company like I did, you’ll find that he’s the real deal. He’s been an Internet marketer for quite some time and he’s got a pretty big following plus he is also the creator of IMTrustWorthy.com which I’m sure you’ve heard by now.

Overall this thing gets 4 1/2 stars for me. I particularly liked the way that they presented the offer. It was very upfront no up sells are down sells. They simply laid out the three options and let you pick which ever one you want. Not many people do that nowadays and I can really appreciate an Internet marketer that is upfront and honest about his products. I can’t comment on their support because I haven’t had any issues to speak of. But they do have an FAQ as well as a support desk link inside of the members area. And get this they even give you their phone number so if you have any issues you can call them and speak to someone directly. All in all this is an awesome freaking product and you should buy it.

Here’s a link to their WSO: “Warrior Special Offer” I had to because I didn’t know what WSO Was for the longest lol

http://flipit4u.speedycrea.hop.clickbank.net

Now for my personal review of Omar’s Product and his business as a whole. I am a member of both Speedy Profit and MUA “My Unfair Advantage” I can confirm what was said above about Omar being an upfront type of guy that isn’t going to trick you into something. Instead you get something unexpected, Results and more information than you signed up for. Omar Martin is a class act when it comes to business relations. He stands behind everything he does if it has a price tag and if you are not happy you will be refunded but honestly I can’t see anyone having the balls to ask for a refund when you get so much content and good information to help you along the way with both of these products. I am in the midst of writing my ebook and this is just the tool I was looking for. I am so glad I found Omar to deal with before I was sucked into someone that is only in it for the buck. Omar is here to help you and that’s what you get. Straight forward hassle free instructions with more than enough information on any topic that you will ever need. He holds weekly webinars for his members on top of all the other stuff you will be blown away at the amount of attention and detail he puts in to every single customer/ member. I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t believe in it and here it is in black and white. Trust me! You can Trust Him! Thanks again Omar for all of your hard work in making our lives easier. – Chris Picanzo -Owner Flipit4u Marketing

Google search back to a 7 Pack!

Google search results back to a 7 pack!

First of all I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Easter Sunday!

Being in the game of search for some time now we have noticed all the recent changes that Google has been throwing at us over the last year or so. It appears that they are going back to the older way of showing results when you do an everything search from the Google home page.

About 2 years ago Google had a 7 Pack to show the top 7 Google Places listings for the term searched for. Everyone thought they had it down and counted on this results format. Then Google changed things up more than once. I’ve seen a 3 pack a 5 pack as well as the original 7. Well it appears they went back to the old way’s of showing you the top 7 places pages in the organic search results, here is an example of a search done today 4/8/12

There is a lot of competition for insurance and I’m proud of the fact that we accomplished a number 1 spot for Rocco Rose Insurance. Yes they are one of my clients Another lesson learned! Look how I built a link for them in this post, thus giving their page a bit of Authority with a good link to their website. This is what google is looking for! Not a catch all but a definite builder of authority. This along with lot’s of other tips and tricks that I will soon be releasing on how to get your business to the top of a Google search!

Now let’s take a look at some past results page screen shots.

Now this is the same type of search for CPA’s which is a very competitive market and they are only showing 3 results for the hot pack of places. This was only back in October of 2011 about 6 months ago.

Now back to today’s search results page.

Cleaner results

I’m liking this look more as it isn’t as cluttered and you can actually see that they are a local business. This also opens the doors to a new approach on getting clients as you can always suggest getting them to the top of a google places search results page. This leaves room for obtaining new clients in the same field. Some people don’t like to do that at all thinking it creates conflict of interests. Personally there is plenty of businesses out there to work with so you wouldn’t have to be in that situation, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. This is when you explain that you will get them to the top of a results page, Not to number 1. As this is not something you can control but we do our best to maintain and optimize so that our clients do get to the number one spot. We just can’t promise that as a result of our efforts.

It’s been a little while since I’ve had time to post and it being Easter Sunday gave me a few minutes to sit and take a look at what’s going on today. I actually like the pages the way they are now. Let’s just hope Google can realize this and keep it that way for more than a few months. This is one of the things that small businesses don’t realize or have the time to even notice. That is why it is so important as a marketing agent or social media manager to stay on top of the little things that matter.

What do you think of the Google front Pack? “The new but old 7 Pack” I’d love to hear your thoughts, just comment below with your own thoughts or suggestions.

How to take advantage of your Google plus page

We all hear how important it is to keep your business pages relevant, a lot of people still don’t take advantage of the benefits that having a strong social game will help your SERP ” Search Engine Results Page”. Well here is an awesome post about using google plus to help boost your authority on the web. Click here

A great post from Social Media Examiner! I advise anyone and especially my clients to give this a good read. There is lots ofinformation that you can use starting today.

iPhone 4′s IOS update showing 4G

I thought this was worth sharing, seeing how it affected me as well.
The new IOS software update for iPhones has a little glitch inside. I was showing a friend and he said mine don’t have that “Pointing out the 4G icon on my AT&T Iphone 4s, he is on Verizon. So the hunt was on and I found this article to help or verify my post. So if you noticed this and was wondering why? Here is your answer.

PS: They somehow placed the 4G icon in the iphone when it was meant to be for the new Ipad 3 that is coming out next week. This was thought to be a little sneaky or tricky but I could care less as long as it works even though I was misled to believe I was running on a 4G network. Has this happened to your phone? Let me know in the comment section.

Let me know if this helped you out with a comment or like.

If your business don’t use SMS mobile marketing

I wanted to share this article because it is such a big player in staying a head of your competition. I’m posting this on the fly as well so pardon any errors that u may see lol. The work is moving to mobile and this is how Pappa John’s Pizza is taking action. http://bit.ly/zvdzXx
Check out our SMS link at the top of our site to see how easy it is to get started.

Why YouTube is important to your business

Are you using YouTube effectively?

You may or may not know but YouTube is owned by Google! So do you think it would benefit your business to rank higher in the search engines when someone is looking for your product or service? You bet it would, and one of the most obvious ways to help that ranking is to get your business on YouTube! They are the second biggest search engine on the internet. YouTube has just recently changed the way their pages look and added some distinguishing features. Some people aren’t so happy with the changes but there will always be people that just don’t like change. I see the changes as a benefit to help spread the word about your business. As you may know there are YouTube pages and Channels, you want your business to have a YouTube Channel. This is considered an extension of your website and should be optimized effectively.

Now you can integrate your Google + Profile with your YouTube Channel, This alone is a great way to get the word out about your business. Here is a link to the post from the YouTube blog. I hope you found this information useful and continue to read our posts as I strive to help you grow your business through education and awareness.

If you haven’t yet please sign up for our tips and newsletter posts by filling in the form to the top right of any page. “like” our Facebook Page and please leave a comment or suggestion below.

If you own a business and would like to out rank your competition on a Google search results page feel free to contact me and I can explain how you can make more money by driving customers right in your front door.

Social Media and Your Business

Article written by: Chris Picanzo

Introduction:

My name is Chris Picanzo I am the owner and creator of Flipit4u Marketing. www.flipit4u.com
I created my business to help local businesses with getting to the top of a google search results page within their product or service, along with Branding their business and generating traffic to their website through the creation of social media. I have been working online on a part time basis since the beginning of AOL. In the state this economy is in, I had a vision of helping struggling businesses so they can compete with the larger corporations as well as their competitors.

Mission:

My mission here is to educate you, the members of a business or corporation on how to keep your business’s reputation in good standings and help keep your google ranking at the top.
Nothing hurts a business more than not showing up on google when a potential customer searches for a service or product in your industry.
This information is not going to end all your problems with SERP “Search Engine Results Page” but it will definately help. This is just one part of the many ways you can help your rankings on any search engine.

Social Media and your Business

Why Social media?
Social media is the fastest growing industry in the history of any business, for that reason alone is why there are over 800 Million users registered on Facebook. Facebook being the largest of the social media frontier. There are hundreds of social media sites on the net, but there are only a hand-full that really matter.

Facebook
Linkedin
Twitter
Youtube
Yelp
foursquare

Facebook- Let’s begin with the largest of them all. Facebook is now the internet. If your business isn’t on facebook than you are losing out on an ocean of potential clients or customers. People all over the world use facebook every day, and when a person has a Facebook it is called a facebook account. I mention this because there is a difference between having an account and having a business page. An account is for people a Page is for businesses. I see it all to often when a person is using their facebook account as a business. This is frowned upon by Facebook, they want everyone to have a business page if you own a business. You as a person can control as many business pages as you want. There is not just business pages, they have organizations, non profit, Music, artists, clubs pretty much any catagory you can think of and you can build a page under the appropriate category.

The pro’s and con’s of using fb as a business vs an account.

For starters if you use an account for your business you can only have up too 5K friends. As a business you can have as many as you want. The second issue is how to gain friends or fans. As an account you have to ask to be someones friend or they have to ask you to be friends with them. When you have a business page people just have to “Like” your business. This is also known as becoming a Fan. As a business you can not write on a person’s wall.. You can however comment on a post as a business and you can post as the business on another business page. This is probably the second most common reason why people prefer to use their account that way. The first is I’m sure because people don’t know the difference and didn’t do any research before creating their page.

Why it’s important – The reason it is so important to have a business page on facebook is the obvious. They are the biggest and google knows it as well as any other search engine knows it. So if you have a business page on Facebook you are going to get looked at by the search engines weather it’s Yahoo, Google or Bing. The fact that you have a page and if filled out correctly you are telling the search engines that your listing is more relevant than someone else without a page.
The more you use your facebook page the better your ranking on google is going to be. Now take that with a grain of salt because there is definitely such thing as over doing it on FB. You do not want this to happen because once you lose your fans it is 10 times harder to get them to come back.

When do I use Facebook for business?

This is a great question because lot’s of businesses just post things when they have the time or post something every morning and don’t look at the demographics of their fans or have any idea when the majority of fans are on FB and will see your posts.
There are a couple of tricks we can use to figure out the best time to post. It’s sort of a live split test on your wall or news feed. If your page is established somewhat already, you can go to the analytics page and view the action your page has and when it happens. Use this information to help base a timeline of when to post on your page.
If your not so established you can try posting a couple of pictures that are either the same or very similar in the message the picture is portraying. Post one in the morning and one in the evening or at night which ever times you think your desired audience would be on facebook. Take the amount of likes and comments from each post and that would help determine your best times to post. Now this isn’t etched in stone because facebook and the people using it are constantly changing. The more stuff you post the more you will get a feel for what times work best for your business.

Facebook conclusion

So now you have some basic knowledge of how and why to use a business page. This report could be 100 pages long if I were to get into every detail but I just want you to know the basics to get you started and have a hand up on what to do and not to do.
So you now have a page for your business and you want it to work for you. I would advise assigning someone in your company to assist you with your facebook page. This is good for a few reasons. 1 it gives your employee a sense of responsibility. 2. So you don’t have to spend all of your time on FB and use your time to run your business. 3. Allowing someone else to control your page will bring in fresh ideas for content and they will have a friend list that your business could be shared with.
You must lay down a set of ground rules to anyone you allow access to your page. You need to be specific in telling them what you expect out of them with a clear set of rules that have a desired result. “Interaction” and “More fans” as well as what never to post in regards to your image. Remember every business is different, the basics apply to all but if you own a night club it would be perfectly normal to post pictures of attractive people and partying. If you have a law firm your not going to want pictures of you partying with the best of them.. lol Just keep it in respective according to your type of business and you will be fine.

Do not over post! There are very few types of business that can get away with posting more than 5 times a day. Depending on your product or service you should on average post no more than 3 times in a day.
Have an action plan before you start posting. Figure out if you want to post something relevant to your industry to inform your fans. Or do you want to interact with them and post questions that will require an answer or opinion.
You can post about your business but people don’t want to see every single post where you are pushing or selling your product or service.
Most fans are looking for something of value from your business page. Make sure you incorporate giving your fans something whether it’s a coupon or a free ebook something, just make sure it has value.
Some businesses use the headlines of the day or week to interact with fans. There is nothing wrong with this method but just don’t lose sight of your objective, gaining fans and turning them into customers.

I hope you were able to get some help from this report. It is all information that I have encountered and researched as I grow my own business. I look forward to helping anyone that asks for the help and can be grateful they found something I wrote. Please feel free to leave a comment or suggestion as I’m sure I’ll be making this a blog post as well as a free report.

Avoid Facebook Viruses

Greetings all,

First off I would like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

I know I have lot’s to be thankful for and I know you do too, if your thinking well it’s been a tough year and things haven’t been so good. Then you need to just look at things a bit differently and see that you have plenty to be thankful for. A family, kids, your health, your eyes your ears, arms and legs. So if things are tough just know that there are lot’s of people fighting a bigger battle than you. Let’s make the new year one to remember! I’m also very thankful for you and the fact that you are here reading this post!

On to Facebook and the phishing virus!

During this last bout Facebook had with all the pictures being posted by people and having tags of your friends in them I was a bit more intriguedby how this could be happening. So I did a little investigating and came up with some or even one particular reason these things were getting so viral . Meaning that they were spreading like wild-fire.

Do you have someone on your friends list that you assume just adds anyone to their list just to have more friends or fans for that matter. The biggest violators of this were those people who are using a Facebook account as a business page! This really bugs me to begin with and then when I was investigating this latest trend of viruses and phishing links I came to realize it was these individual accounts that were causing the viruses to go viral. These people/pages that are running against Facebook policy were the main reason this type of hack worked so well.

The page or person in question may be friends with a lot of your mutual friends and the way they go about adding people is very careless. They add anyone that requests them, because they are somewhat desperate for likes or friends. I noticed during this duration of invasion a couple of requests so I would look into the profile requesting to friend me and see that they have 1,2 or no more than 10 or so friends. This was the account setting up to be used as the hacker. Guess who’s profiles were on these suspicious accounts every time I investigated them. Yup you guessed it, those accounts I speak of above. The ones that will accept anyone to their friends list. So the hackers got in and it goes from there. They used names of people you / we recognize and tag that person in the ugly picture and curiosity killed the cat and more and more people were affected because they thought that there close legitimate friend was in the photo or part of it so they clicked away.

The moral of this post is DO NOT accept just anyone as a friend because it can affect everyone on Facebook as did this last bomb of viruses.

I hope that helps some one and prevents even just one incident because that’s all it takes is just one person to fall for it and the ball just rolls down hill from there!

PS: Once again Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy the time with your family! We tend to take it for granted throughout the year so just enjoy and be Thankful.

Getting your site or blog to rank on google

I know it’s been almost a month since my last blog post and I must say I miss writing for myself that is. I have actually been very busy working on some new clients and actually doing what I preach. A bit off topic for a moment, I would like to note that I always put the clients needs in front of my own needs and want to advocate that you do too. Here I am being a social media expert and yet my own page suffers and lacks the jazz and fans I should have. Only because I have grown my business a great deal since I started what seems like a few short months ago. So all of my focus and time has been put in on getting results for my clients, this hurts me a little bit but I know that my clients are getting everything I promised and then some, well a lot. Enough about me and I promise to keep a steady stream of usefull information for anyone that finds it interesting. Now getting your site to rank on Google.

I was just about to post some info that I found on another site about Email terms everyone should know. Then I had a thought about what I have recently learned about blogging or posting to your web site. Google is of course the most used search engine out there today so everyone pretty much plays by there rules to stay in the game. I have learned that if you like to share other stories that someone else has written, you need to either share the link or if you want to have it on your site there are a couple of things to consider.

A. If you just copy and paste the whole article your readers will get what they are looking for as far as information goes but it will actually hurt your site when it comes to ranking in the search engines. By copying and pasting the whole thing, yes you would be giving credit to the actual author and web site. “I would hope” you do that, because that is just good practice and the right thing to do. But when it comes to Google and it’s algorithm’s it will see your site as a secondary source of information and they actually penalize you for that because your site doesn’t have original content that can be considered relevant. We all know that the new Google algorithm is all about being relevant. So your other option and the best one is like I have done below with the article I intended to share. It is best done if you can write a few sentences about the topic you are referring to and that gives you a chance to write some original material that Google will see Then post a link directing others to the original post. Wella now you have original content and a chance to get a link back to your site if noticed by the original author as well.
Click Here! For a Marketing Blue Print
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