Linkcrafter.com – Blog

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Japanese achieved major advances in manufacturing management, which led to their rise as an economic power. The Japanese economic miracle and the country’s new manufacturing skills and methods surprised western firms; but the Japanese had done this by studying, adopting, and eventually perfecting the best practices of the West itself.

A research team at Harvard and Duke Universities found that India is achieving similar feats in workforce development by learning from the best practices of the western companies that have outsourced their computer systems and call centers there. It has adopted these practices and perfected them.

The report titled “How the Disciple Became the Guru”, details the workforce-development practices of 24 leading companies in India. You can download it here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1170049

Who is White?

Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty.

This is Book offer an undoubtedly provocative and intense insight into the deeper meanings of race and identity today. Written by a Black woman adds more to the sweetness and the controversy.

“Nell Irvin Painter’s book title, “The History of White People” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians.”

Great Book review at the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Gordon-t.html?hpw

Can a Black historian write about white people history?

It’s a mind blowing book. Don’t be stopped by the skin color of the author. Haven’t white people been writing about people of color throughout history?

If you are interested in racial studies, immigration issues, Black & White classification?  You’ll surely learn a lot from Nell Irvin Painter‘s book and better understand many contemporary issues.

A new hospitality industry research study finds that rates are the key factor in maintaining revenues, rather than occupancy, when European hotels compare their rates and revenues to their competitive set.

The main finding is that Hotels that maintain a higher price position than their competitors record relatively higher Revenue, even though their average occupancy is relatively lower (Based on 8,026 hotel observations taken during 2006 and 2007, just at the end of the last boom, and during 2008 and 2009, when most nations endured an abrupt recession).

The hospitality research analysis noted that small and medium size hotels gained relatively higher occupancy when they offered prices lower than their competitors, as compared to large hotels. But the study’s main findings still held regardless of hotel size or presence of chain management.

You can download a free copy of the research paper  here: http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-15216.html > Registration required

According to a new study released by BIA/Kelsey Group (www.bia.com and www.kelseygroup.com), Nearly All Consumers (97%) Now Use Online Media to Shop Locally:

• Search engines (used by 90 percent of consumers)
• Internet Yellow Pages (48 percent)
• Comparison shopping sites (42 percent)
• Vertical sites (24 percent)

According to the study, on average, consumers are using 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products or services in their local area, up from 6.5 sources in 2009 and 5.8 in 2008, revealing a noteworthy increase in audience fragmentation. Additional findings include:

• 58 percent of respondents report using an online coupon when shopping for products or services in their local area in the past year.
• 19 percent of respondents report making an appointment online in the past six months for a service other than a restaurant reservation (e.g., business appointment, health-care appointment, auto service or personal service such as a beauty shop).

More detail on the research paper released here: http://www.bia.com/pr100310-consumers-use-online-media-local.asp

On February 11, 2009, John Fitz, a leads group manager in Aberdeen, South Dakota, experienced first-hand what is happening with most leads group around the nation. He had just returned home from a trip to Yankton, SD, to see his wife’s family. Sitting in front of his computer, he read the e-mail that would change the course of his life forever.

It was from Elizabeth, a member of his local leads group, writing to say that the majority of his group members had left to join another group! Elizabeth said that she wanted to maintain a working relationship, but unfortunately, she would be joining the other group as well.

Needless to say, John was devastated. He had worked day in and day out for five long, hard years, scrambling to schedule meetings, arrange sponsors, and share leads. He quickly found himself lost and floundering, wondering where to go from there.

The world of leads groups is changing fast. Most interactions are taking place online through social media. Old fashioned leads groups are losing ground, and more and more members are quietly questioning the benefit of annual membership fees and the value for time and money of the monthly meetings.

Why are more and more members of old-style leads groups joining online leads groups in droves? Because they have the opportunity to obtain more sales leads and business opportunities with less effort, less expense, and less time wasted in social networking that has no immediate impact on their business.

As a leads group manager, you need to innovate. Linkcrafter sits on the nose of this revolution. In less than 3 months, Linkcrafter became the #1 leads groups and referral networks utility in the USA and in Europe, managing more than 30.000 leads groups in the US and around the world.

We urge you to join Linkcrafter today and secure your group name and category before your members join groups created by competitors. The Linkcrafter utility will help you create value for your members, while keeping the local ground and social gathering a useful place to build relationships and reinforce trust.

If you join today, we guarantee you can promote your products for free with all the powerful tools on Linkcrafter!

MarketingSherpa has just released “Marketing Wisdom for 2010″. It’s a real source or marketing wisdom. It compiles the best advice on topics such as social media, search, email, lead generation, testing, and more.

70 Marketers and Agencies Share Real-Life Stories and Lessons Learned.

You can download your Free copy here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/Wisdom2010.pdf

Below 3 excerpts of lessons learned by fellow business people:

REWARD CLICKS WITH A GOOD OFFER
We got a doctor’s website on the first page of Google through paid search and watched his traffic increase by 400% in one month. He still was not getting new patients. We added a new patient form to the home page of the website. He still was not getting new patients. Remember this: No one will ever give you their name, email and phone number if they don’t get anything in return.
So, if you have the new patient form on the upper-fold of the home page of your site, offer your visitors something for giving your their information. The doctor offered discounted services to those that filled out the form, and he has now had three record breaking months of new patients this year and is on track to break his record for most new patients in one year.
Stuart Draper, Get Found First LLC
www.GetFoundFirst.com

SEGMENT LEADS BY INTEREST
Instead of including leads in every campaign, we decided to segment them into campaigns by their areas of interest. To do this, we divided leads by their past activities within key topics and solutions (white paper downloads, webinar registrations, previous campaign responses, etc.) then slotted them into campaigns centered on those key topics and solutions. As a result, we experienced a significant increase in conversions and more than a 300% increase in our response rates, including clickthrough rates and open rates. At the end of the day we are able to better communicate with our leads with messaging relative to what they are interested in as well as run multiple campaigns simultaneously.
Farrah Hylton, Ariba Inc.
www.ariba.com

DON’T OVERLOOK COMMUNITY PAPERS
While daily newspapers continue to struggle, a portion of the publishing industry is not only surviving, it’s thriving. And yet community papers are often overlooked by marketers. This year in particular, community newspapers offered a major opportunity. As resources continue to get cut, many papers are increasingly turning to outside sources for content, including public relations agencies and trusted article-placement services. Marketers who are able to deliver compelling content and story ideas can take advantage of the loyal audience, hyper-local focus and popular online presence that community papers provide.
David Olson, ARAnet Inc. www.aranetonline.com

This booklet could be a source of leads generation through business networking, leads groups or advertising.

On February 11, 2009, John Fitz, a leads group manager in Aberdeen, South Dakota, experienced first-hand what is happening with most leads group around the nation. He had just returned home from a trip to Yankton, SD, to see his wife’s family. Sitting in front of his computer, he read the e-mail that would change the course of his life forever.

It was from Elizabeth, a member of his local leads group, writing to say that the majority of his group members had left to join another group! Elizabeth said that she wanted to maintain a working relationship, but unfortunately, she would be joining the other group as well.

Needless to say, John was devastated. He had worked day in and day out for five long, hard years, scrambling to schedule meetings, arrange sponsors, and share leads. He quickly found himself lost and floundering, wondering where to go from there.

The world of leads groups is changing fast. Most interactions are taking place online through social media. Old fashioned leads groups are losing ground, and more and more members are quietly questioning the benefit of annual membership fees and the value for time and money of the monthly meetings.

Why are more and more members of old-style leads groups joining online leads groups in droves? Because they have the opportunity to obtain more sales leads and business opportunities with less effort, less expense, and less time wasted in social networking that has no immediate impact on their business.

As a leads group manager, you need to innovate. Linkcrafter sits on the nose of this revolution. In less than 3 months, Linkcrafter became the #1 leads groups and referral networks utility in the USA and in Europe.

We urge you to join Linkcrafter today and secure your group name and category before your members join groups created by competitors. The Linkcrafter utility will help you create value for your members, while keeping the local ground and social gathering a useful place to build relationships and reinforce trust.

If you join today, we guarantee you can promote your products for free with all the powerful tools on Linkcrafter!

Today, Linkcrafter is making its powerful marketing widgets available to all .

Linkcrafter is a marketing solution built to capture business opportunities by answering consumers questions. Using the Answers widget, you can directly reach customers and do your marketing without wasting money on expensive advertising or wasting time on networking websites, clubs or events.

There are 3 kind of widgets:

1. Answers Link Widget

It’s a unique link to use in your email signature, Newsletter, on Twitter, Facebook, or on your blog, website. Your Contacts, customers and friends could follow this link to send you their requests, questions and needs. All requests collected through your widget are visible only to you.

Answers Link Widget

Tip: Customize your Url with a sexy name like : AskJohn (Your name), Ask an Expert, Ask a Pro, AskGoogle (company name).

2. Answers Badge Widget

Answers Badge works the same way as the Answers Link, but is more visual in presentation. You can create badges in different colors and put them on several websites, blogs, social networks.

Sample Answers Badges:

3. Answers Form Widget

With Answer form, your visitors, customers will never have to leave your website or blog to send you their requests, needs and questions. The same answers form available at solution-feed.com will be integrated into your website.

To start select the main categories you want to make available, and generate the widget script to integrat into your website page.

For small business owners, corporations, community managers, freelancers, service professionals, Linkcrafter Answers Widgets are very powerful utilities to engage consumers, build long lasting relationship with customers and local community.

To create your own widget, visit Linkcrafter.com and after logging in, click on “Create need widget” on your home page or on Needs page.

You can create as many widgets as you want.

Innovative marketing solution to Bypass Internet gatekeepers and directly reach customers

The idea started as a common courtesy for our friends. Then we began using it to help our clients.  It ended up being a game-changing innovation that is revolutionizing the entire marketing industry. It redefines the role of business and accomplishes the near impossible: marketing without spending money in advertising or wasting time in networking.

We knew then that this idea had the power to transform the over-$600 billion advertising industry. We called it IRaaS™.

It is a system built like Yahoo Answers but for business purpose: to capture business opportunities by answering consumers’ questions.

In the present economic conditions this kind of solution is a huge relief for small business owners who are struggling to attract clients but don’t have money to invest in advertising nor have time to spend in countless networking websites, clubs and events.

Linkcrafter Enables Small Business Owners to Bypass the Internet Gatekeepers

“Ninety percent of all Internet traffic goes to only 5 percent of all Websites. A business’ success isn’t about the owner’s talents or how smart the marketing plan is. It’s about paying exorbitant amounts – in the form of sponsored links and ad words – to the Internet gatekeepers that prevent small businesses from directly reaching customers. In this way, every year, millions of entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, freelancers, small business owners dreams die, simply because they can’t get noticed and attract enough audience and customers to change their dream into reality.

We wanted to help, and today Linkcrafter is for small businesses the fastest, easiest and most reliable method to get noticed and develop relationships that will generate more business, without spending money on advertising,” said Mawuna R. Koutonin, founder and CEO of Linkcrafter.com.

How Linkcrafter Works?

Linkcrafter has created a small website open to consumers at large.  It encourages people to post their burning questions, needs or requests, and they will be provided in a short period, if not minutes, free personalized answers from experts and business professionals. This public portal is solution-feed.com

Once a customer’s question is received, Linkcrafter’s proprietary application searches the site’s network of experts and routes the question to the small business professional most knowledgeable about the topic.

It is an incredible leads generating machine because the vast majority of questions involve purchase decision or service need. Small businesses are motivated to respond quickly and thoroughly because they could mention their products or services, where relevant, in their answers, and furthermore Linkcrafter puts an advertisement for their business adjacent to the answer.

« Look Google » exclaims Mawuna, « advertisers would pay a lot of money to appear next to relevant questions. With Linkcrafter each expert and professional act as a mini-google: They receive questions relevant to their business area and expertise, they answer and their ad appears in or next to the answers.”

The main benefit of Linkcrafter is the shift from chasing customers to customers coming to you, because first consumers come to you with their questions and needs.

ABOUT LINKCRAFTER

Linkcrafter was founded in 2007 based on a personal life experience of the founder in Africa. Mawuna’s inspirational story could be found on this post: “Knowledge for Food” (http://linkcrafter.com/blog/?p=1169)

If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with the Founder and CEO, please call at +33 6 28 06 79 20 (Paris, France region – GMT +2) or e-mail at mk@linkcrafter.com