Above And Beyond Promotion

Posts Tagged ‘Don’

MARCH MADNESS-You Can Bet on It

Word Count:
1739

Summary:
Important upcoming dates on your calendar should include March 15th, 17th and April 1st. March 15th, the Ides of March, marks the day that Julius Caesar met his demise, and it’s also the day after March Madness tips-off. March 17th is, of course, the day when everyone is Irish, and it’s also the mid-point between the NCAA Tournament’s first and second rounds (March 16-19, 2006).

Keywords:
march madness; basketball; NCAA; betting; wager; wagering

Article Body:
You’re a fool if you don’t know that April 1st is when the Final Four contests commence, with the NCAA National Championship being determined on April 3rd.

It is a crazy time of year all-around and college basketball embraces this insanity whole-heartedly. If you’re planning on wagering on March Madness-the biggest sporting event of the month and one of the most heavily bet events each year-you may want to consider a few important facts when choosing your brackets or making a team-on-team wager.

March Madness features 65 teams from some of the best known and also from some of the lesser-known college hoop conferences. Certainly you’ll see teams from the prestigious Atlantic Coast, Big East, PAC-10, SEC, Big 12 and Big 10, and you’ll also find various other conferences represented, such as the Metro Atlantic, Big Sky, Big South and America East. Most fans will have heard of and know something about the teams from the more competitive conferences, however the schools from conferences that are not closely followed during the year are often difficult for even experts to analyze.

In the first round, bottom seeds contend against top seeds with the results usually being predictable-the top seeds more often than not win. However, as far as covering goes, that’s a different story. When you look at underdog teams from lower ranked conferences they rarely win, but about half of the time they beat the spread, which spells “upset” for the bettor.

Whether you’re considering the first round or focused on the Sweet Sixteen, which is when making your picks gets extremely difficult, here are a few guidelines to help you make productive wagers.

Ranked Number 1? Big Deal:

In the last 20 years, the team nationally ranked number one going into the tournament has won it only three times. Since 1966 the top three NCAA teams have all battled it out in the Final Four only once. Let’s face it, most teams competing in March Madness are pretty good and when you come down to it, what’s the difference between the seventh and first ranked team? Not a whole lot. This is especially true in a sport where during the regular season there have been virtually no head-to-head match-ups between initial tournament participants. An additional fly in this year’s ointment are the numerous conference changes that various teams have initiated, with more than a half-dozen perennial March Madness contenders switching leagues.

The bottom line is-do your homework. Read up on the teams and find one or two experts who have crunched the numbers for you and really analyzed each club according to how they’ve performed in various situations.

Some Things Won’t Change (Probably):

Teams that play well on the road tend to do well in the March Madness frenzy, where almost every team, except for the top seeds, play away from comfortable, familiar surroundings. So, if a team has been a road warrior all season, they will probably continue to be that same animal in March and possibly into April.

During March Madness teams usually step it up, performing at an extremely high level. If throughout the regular season a team has played and consistently beat good teams, chances are they will continue to do so from March 14th to April 3rd. It is a tough, grueling tournament, and you want to back teams that can step up to the challenge every time. Who are they? They tend to be the clubs that have been stepping up all season.

More experience and less talent will more often than not beat more talent and less experience. Why? It’s the nature of March Madness. Teams are under a lot of pressure, playing in unknown arenas and in the national spotlight against teams they’ve never seen. There’s a lot of travel and little rest between games, which translates into an advantage for a team that’s been there before with a coach who has experience in the March Madness pressure cooker.

Numbers That Don’t Lie (Well, Usually They Don’t):

There are no guarantees when it comes to any sporting contest. With that in mind, here are a few basic statistical observations to consider. When it comes to championships and March Madness, 13 of the last 15 teams have either been a number one or two seed. In the past 26 years (since 1979), the final two teams vying for the championship have been there before. (Limits the field a little bit, doesn’t it?) Finally, in the last 24 years there has always been a number one seed in the Final Four. Do long shots win it all? In this contest, hardly ever and certainly not in the last quarter century.

Conferences are important. If a team plays in an elite conference, has faced the type of competition that a tough conference offers, and has done well in their conference, they are definitely a contender. If they play consistently well, that means more than the occasional blowout victory amongst various games they’ve blown in the final minute. Look for teams that play well under pressure.

With those tips in mind, you’ll want to consider that in the past seven NCAA Tournaments, two teams in the Final Four came from the same conference and in the last five of six tournaments three teams in the Elite Eight came from the same conference. In eight of the last 11 Sweet Sixteen rounds, one conference has contributed four teams and last year nine of the sixteen came from three conferences-the Big East, Big Ten, and ACC.

You’ll want to look closely at top seeded teams from powerful conferences. Although it’s called “March Madness,” remember that wagering on teams that are presently strong and have been strong contenders in the past may be conservative but it makes sense. Look for a conference that has at least four teams in the tournament and stick with them. Odds are that you’ll have someone in the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four.

Also, consider a well-conditioned 10 or 12 seed for one of your picks. Why? Since 1997 each Sweet Sixteen round has had at least one 10 seed and in five of the last seven Sweet Sixteen’s a 12 seed has been there. How do seven, eight, and nine seeds do? They don’t even come close to performing the way 10′s and 12′s do. However, more often than not a three to eight seed makes it to the final four. Do your homework and pick one from this group to become a member of that heralded quartet.

Team and Tournament Specifics:

If you’re serious about wagering, you’ll want to read at least one or more of the many in-depth reports available through various media-magazines, newspapers, and the Web. A good report will include an analysis of the team, especially the point guard and the interior players, road and home record, recent performance, playing style, turnover ratio, penchant for committing fouls, injuries, tournament history, bench, and coaching.

As an example, consider these few key elements as they relate to the tournament.

Point Guard and Interior Players:

Point guards are often the playmakers on the court-controlling the tempo, keeping the team on the same page; and leading by example. A sound, dynamic point guard can be the difference between long-term survival and immediate elimination. As the stakes get higher, the position becomes even more important.

Strong, solid interior players who can bang inside and control the boards are essential. Teams in the top conferences work hard to secure guys who will wear down and dominate other teams inside. The Big East, ACC, Big 12, Big 10 and PAC-10 are noted for tough, interior play. In this brutal tournament these types of players can be the difference in the second half of any and every game.

Fouls:

A team with key players who get into foul trouble can be in big trouble in the tournament. The best of the best referees will be officiating and they won’t hesitate to make a call no matter how close the game is or how little time is left. During crunch time, when mistakes tend to happen, is also when cool-headed experience can pay off for a team.

The Bench:

It’s a long road from the March 14th tip-off to the April 3rd final game showdown. A deep, mature bench offers a huge advantage to any team. There’s no way around it, every player is important during this three-week period.

Turnover Ratio:

If teams are making mistakes during the regular season, they will continue to do so in the post season. Turnovers will kill any team’s chances of advancing to the next round. Again, think-point guard and the bench.

Toughness:

How do you evaluate toughness? First look at the coach and his staff. Consider how disciplined the team is. Find a time when the team lost a tough one or got blown out and look at how they responded. Don’t just consider the next game but the next series of contests. Did they meet that opponent again?

How durable are the starters and how driven are they to play? Is this a team that has players sitting all the time due to injury?

Is there one guy, a true team leader, who may not be the most talented player on the court but is savvy, dedicated, and focused on one thing-winning? Does he push the other players to excel through example, team play, and determined grit?

Another part of toughness relates to a team’s legs or ability to play up-tempo ball. If a team can control the tempo and run with the best of them, they’re not going to give up, and they will usually not be intimidated. If pushed, they’ll push back. They’ll counter the energy of the other team every time.

These are just a few ways to assess a team’s toughness, which translates into durability and resiliency. Both are needed to go deep into the NCAA Tournament.

A Final Thought on the Final Four:

Often people make gut choices rather than analyzing a team’s performance, reading some expert analysis, and considering match-ups and trends. If you really want to go deep into the tournament, then do your homework. It can payoff, taking you to the National Championship by insuring that you make sane picks without bending to the pressures of March Madness.

Text-Link Advertising: Making the Most of Your Budget

Word Count:
772

Summary:
Make the most of your text-link advertising dollars with these tips.

Keywords:
text-link advertising, text link ad

Article Body:
Reading through a text-link advertising forum recently, I noticed a number of negative posts. One post in particular stuck in my mind and I want to answer it here.

The poster had been frustrated with his results from a text-link ad campaign. He mentioned that he was new to text-link advertising and he wasn’t getting any results.

My short answer to him would be, “Your text-link ads can get results, but you have to use the right text links and the right ads.”

My long answer follows, in the form of five key tips for any text-link advertising campaign:

1-First, make sure you have a product that’s good. In this case, your product is your website. Make sure it’s designed well, easy to navigate, with content people are interested in. Nothing is worse for a bad website than a good text-link ad campaign–you drive people to it once and then they never come back.

While you’re at it, be sure your website is designed to encourage visitors to do what you want them to do (i.e. click on CPC ads, buy your or your affiliate program’s products, etc.), ETHICALLY, of course.

2-Second, what’s your ad campaign objective? Before you spend a penny on text-link advertising, you need to decide what you want your ads to do for you. Do you just want more traffic to your site? Or do you want people to take some action once they get to your site (i.e., buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, etc.). Make sure you’re clear on what you want for your text-link ad dollars first.

3-Related to step 2, take advantage of any special features offered by the website you’ve placed your text-link ads on–especially if they offer conversion tracking. Conversion, for the uninitiated, means CONVERTING a visitor into either a customer (they buy a product), a subscriber (they sign up for your newsletter) or whatever other action you want to “CONVERT” your visitors into taking. Conversion tracking will help you figure out which of your text-link ads are getting you the kind of visitors you want.

4-Test, test, test. The beauty of most text-link advertising is that it’s not prohibitively expensive to advertise or test your ads (as long as you watch your spending limits). If you can, run a few different text-link ad variations.

Something to consider when creating your text-link ad: put yourself in your visitors’ shoes as much as possible. When you’re just surfing the web casually or looking for information in a broad sense, your searches tend to be broad, don’t they? But when you’re ready to buy, or take some other action, your searches are more narrow and your search terms are more specific to what you want.

For example, if you’re casually interested in bicycles, you might search just using that as your keyword, “bicycle.” But once you’ve decided to buy a bike, you’ll probably have something more specific in mind: “red ten-speed bikes” or “Mike’s Bike Shop.”

If you want your visitors to do something specific at your website, then your text-link ad should be as specific as possible.

Once you set up your text-link ad campaign, give it some time to see what ads work, at least a week or preferably a couple of weeks. Be aware of the season, or if a holiday weekend falls during your testing, as those factors will affect your text-link ads’ results.

5-And last but not least, don’t be afraid to make changes to your text-link ad campaign. Just make sure they’re incremental, and give each change some time to see if it works.

For example, pick the text-link ad that gives you the best conversion rate and tweak it, while you drop the others. Change the times and days of the week it appears (if you can) to find out when to schedule them. Or try another text-link ad variation.

Just make sure you make these changes to your text-link ads one at a time and keep track of them (enter your text-link ad changes into a diary or journal, for example) so you can easily measure their effect. A tweak as minor as changing a word or two in your text-link ad could increase your conversion rate significantly. Or it might not. So keep track of what works (and what doesn’t so you don’t repeat it).

Don’t make the mistake that poster made, throwing money at his text-link advertising and then cutting it off in frustration when it didn’t work. Make sure to set up your text-link ads properly and then tinker with them until you get the results you want.

Low Cost Website Promotion That Works

Word Count:
433

Summary:
Search Engine Submission and Ranking are the two basic parts to a low cost web site promotion. Both of the parts have the same effect on the market of the web site ? for your products and services presented in your web site catches the people’s attention.

Keywords:
internet marketing, make money online, home based business, internet business, online business opportunity, affiliate marketing, gambling

Article Body:
Anybody could own a web site. Anybody could up sell their own products and services to their target audience. Anyone could try to promote their web site with low cost promotion. But there are not many web-masters that have a truly successful web site with traffic all day through. What these individuals or companies lack is the most essential factor of success ? a low cost web site promotion that really works.

If you have been trying to promote your own web site and you have received traffic every hour, my hands are down for you. But for those people who need assistance, who does not have the patience to promote their own product and services, and lacks knowledge to properly advertise themselves, here are some guidelines to help you achieve success with a low cost web site promotion.

Search Engine Submission and Ranking are the two basic parts to a low cost web site promotion. Both of the parts have the same effect on the market of the web site ? for your products and services presented in your web site catches the people’s attention.

The first inexpensive method of web site promotion is the search engine submission. This first part is the act of filing information and submitting your web site to search engines. There are two types of Search engine submission ? manual and automatic. For a low cost and effective web site promotion, automatic submission is ideal because after filling up the information, a software program would forward this information to other search engines.

The second money-saving web site promotion is ranking. This refers to the numerical position in which your web site appears on a search engine, based upon the web site’s criteria. Some search engines rank the order in which your search results appear primarily by how many other web sites link to each page. The leading web sites on this order would eventually fulfill a low cost web site promotion.

Other types of inexpensive web site promotion you could use to boost up traffic on your web site are banner advertising, classified ads, text links and section sponsorship. Banner advertisements pop up above and below web pages, and sometimes in another window. Text links and section sponsorship may cost more, but these methods helps in promoting to your specified target audience. It wouldn’t harm your web site to try these methods.

Always remember that the effects of your not so costly web site promotion hits are increasing significantly each day. Don’t waste time; find an effective and affordable web site promotion of your choice today.

Top 3 Reasons Why Cities Do Not Promote Growth And Progress

Word Count:
716

Summary:
Not every city has the proper political and social environment to sustain growth. In fact, there are some cities who are completely opposed to growth and work very hard to maintain the status quo, regardless of how the world is changing around them.

Land developers and investors specifically look for cities that are fully open to growth and progress. Cities that have municipalities open to growth and development are prime locations to build large commercial and multi-famil…

Keywords:
commercial real estate, real estate, commercial real estate investor, investor, land developer, real estate investor

Article Body:
Not every city has the proper political and social environment to sustain growth. In fact, there are some cities who are completely opposed to growth and work very hard to maintain the status quo, regardless of how the world is changing around them.

Land developers and investors specifically look for cities that are fully open to growth and progress. Cities that have municipalities open to growth and development are prime locations to build large commercial and multi-family properties. These cities often have future land use maps where they outline land and color code them based on the zonings, or type of properties they will allow within the border. This is a city that is looking to grow and they actually have a plan for it. These cities will be ready to help you with anything you need to get that land developed, especially with a growing population or major change in infrastructure.

The cities that are not open to growth have three major characteristics that are clear signs that growth or development are NOT in their future.

The first is purely political. Even if city officials are pro-business and development, well-organized opposition can sway votes and cause projects to die. Maybe not with the city, but with the people in the city as well. The city officials may have an election coming up or there are strong opposing forces and any major moves may hurt their campaign and position. It could even carry to the lenders in that if they realize there is opposition, even though they could say “Yes,” they will say “No,” to avoid public ridicule. Politics can be a huge constraint to growth in a city.

The second is that the people voted into local office are elected to keep the city the way things are. The politicians are put into office because of their commitment to keep things the same so growth and development are out of the question. They focus in maintaining not growing which is suicide for a developer. You can bet 30 acres of raw land zoned commercial will not be approved as a new mall or office park. The red tape and barriers would be so thick, that it would take years and years before a project would ever be approved- or ever approved for that matter. City officials would simply lay every obstacle in your route before they would allow such huge changes. These are the cities a land developer MUST avoid unless they want to spend 3-5 years spending money and trying to get a project approved.

The third is state law restricts local governments from planning growth. So the local government may have ideas, but the state restricts them from actually moving forward. There may be extremely strict guidelines or jurisdictions or even conflicting views between the local and state governments. And you know where this leaves the land developer or investor? In the middle running around with no real future for a project. This is where you do NOT want to find yourself.

As you can see, there are multiple reasons as to why a land developer or investor would not want to work in a specific city. You can easily find out by asking to the local brokers. You can ask them if the municipality is open to development. They will either say, oh yes definitely. In fact, they may mention that the local government will provide tax incentives for the jobs that are created and will be willing to help any way they possibly can. Or, you may get, our city government is very strict and it takes a while for projects to be approved.

A simple discussion with the local brokers and even Chamber of Commerce will give you a good idea if they will be open to working with you and your proposal. Otherwise, no matter how good the deal looks theoretically, leave it alone if the city won’t cooperate. Don’t expect that red tape to disappear- it rarely does without a good, long, expensive fight.

As a commercial real estate land developer or investor, the golden rule is to only work in cities that are willing to work with you. It makes the process so much easier and enjoyable working in a city that welcomes your presence and efforts.

Web Site Promotion – 6 Key Press Release Facts – Short Version

Word Count:
222

Summary:
How to Create A Hard Hitting Press Release – Keep it informational and concise. Avoid the use of superfluous language and adjectives. Editors want to know the facts.

Keywords:
web site promotion, search engine promotion, write promotion, web promotion, how to write promotion, promotion how to, promotion articles, promotion guide, internet promotion, marketing promotion

Article Body:
By Anne Marie Baugh

6 Important Facts To Remember:

(1) Target The Correct Publications – Resist the urge to blast your press release out to thousands of publications, most of who will not be interested. Most likely this technique will annoy them. Instead, target the publications that will be most interested in your press release.

(2) Send A Personalized Letter – Send a letter directly to the correct editor of the publications you have selected. Don’t be afraid to call and confirm the editor’s name. Then send the press release with the cover letter and follow up with a friendly, non-pushy phone call.

(3) Create A Press Kit – Create press kit that defines all of your successes and achievements. Include a bio, press releases, and clips.

(4) Don’t Limit Yourself To Online Ezines and Newsletters – Plenty of valuable newsletters still exist in print, hard copy form. Target these editors as well. Many are hungry for content.

(5) Get Yourself In Front Of An Audience – Don’t forget the real world! Find opportunities to speak to your target audience. Many professional organizations are looking for free speakers. Take these opportunities and run with them.

(6) Pitch Like A Pro! – Sometimes the best approach to the media is a simple pitch. Forget the press release and all the elegant literature. Make a phone call and pitch your story. It’s often the most effective approach.