Creative Loafing

Have you tried creative loafing? It is a good excuse to relax, and also a great way to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems. How does one creatively loaf? Just relax, open your mind, and use one of the many idea-generating techniques.

A Creative Loafing Technique

My favorite technique is one that is best for generating new ideas rather than solving specific problems. It can be used in any area of life. It is simply the imagining of new applications for existing ideas.

Once, while laying on the couch, I saw an advertisement for a company that uses a dog to find mold in your house. You may know that dogs can be trained to sniff out almost anything. There was even a news story a year or two ago about a dog that could detect if you had cancer.

What was my first thought? “I wonder what else dogs could find by smell?” The first idea that came to mind was to use dogs to find other pets. They find lost people so well, so why not have a service to find lost pets? just one sniff of the cats favorite rug, and the dog is on the trail.

A Creative Loafing Example

You can certainly use your relaxing times to just randomly ponder things, but why not put creative loafing together with a good idea-generating technique. Then you can lay under a tree and have an endless stream of creative new ideas. For this “new-application technique,” just start with the essence of the idea, and look for new ways to use it.

For example, you might lay there and think about the pneumatic tubes that deliver your money and papers at a bank’s drive-through. The essence is a cartridge that delivers things through a tube using air pressure. I imagine the same thing would work for human transport. Could you ride “the tube” to the next city, or maybe make this into an amusement park ride?

Look other aspects of an idea too. For example, these tubes allow several customers to be waited on at once. Where else do they need this? A fast food drive through comes to mind. Perhaps pneumatic tubes would spill drinks, but the idea of multiple car lanes can be used. Several drive-through windows, radiating out like spokes, at different angles, would allow three different lines of cars.

If you want to practice using this technique, just lay back and…

- Imagine three new uses for pedal-power.

- Imagine two new uses for magnets.

- Think of a new application for Darwin’s theory of natural selection, outside of biology.

Can you see how easy it is to come up with new ideas? Why not learn a few more techniques? Then apply them to personal problems. Finally, to make the best use of your creative loafing time, keep a notebook or tape recorder ready.

Steve Gillman has been studying brainpower and related topics for years. For more on How To Increase Brain Power, and to get the Brain Power Newsletter and other free gifts, visit: www.IncreaseBrainPower.com

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    post Need Traffic? Pay for It !

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    There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website, lets examine the paid methods of getting traffic.

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    You must select keywords that will drive traffic to your site but will not cause your CPC bill to skyrocket without converting prospects into sales. Your description must also complement your keyword so that it reinforces your products and services.

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    Funny you might think, but everyday, advertisers haphazardly choose keywords that have no bearing on their site. They now start to receive customers but have no conversions as these were not targeted visitors. By now the CPC bill is high and sales are still low to non-existent.

    So for my food site, a better choice of keyword would be “jerk seasoning”, and if I wanted to narrow my target market more with specific searches, I would use “Jamaican jerk seasoning”. This would be sure to send me only targeted customers searching for my products. My conversion rate will be higher out of this batch of qualified prospects.

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    Coming… Part II : Free Website Traffic Building will deal with the free ways you can drive traffic to your site without spending a dime.

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    post How To Use A ‘Tell A Friend Script’ To Drive Traffic Today?

    More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic to the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

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    Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

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    Tell A Friend Script

    One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

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    Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

    With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

    Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

    Tell A Friend Script Availability

    A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

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    It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.

    Subscribe to Gerardas Norkus’ free Internet marketing newsletter at http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com and discover heaps of tips, tricks, and secrets that will quickly boost your online sales and profits.

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    post Copyright - What Can You Protect?

    The legal protection known has “copyright” has come front and center over the past few years with major legal rulings regarding peer-to-peer networks on the Internet. Copyright protection, however, can be a confusing area of the law. This article details what can and cannot be protected by copyright.

    Copyright Protection? - Yes

    Copyright protects “original works of authorship” in a tangible, fixed form of expression. The material does need to be directly perceptible as long as it can be expressed with the aid of technology. A good example of this is a movie, which requires a projection device of some sort.

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    Copyright protection is a valuable intellectual property tool. If it all possible, copyright the material you produce to prevent others from misusing it.

    Richard Chapo is with http://www.sandiegobusinesslawfirm.com - providing legal services to businesses in San Diego.

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