I was speaking with someone yesterday who – at least for the moment – is down and out and dependent on others for her survival. A chain of events beyond her control lead to this point, but her resolve was stunning and as she left she wished me a “Happy Thanksgiving”.

I wish for us the same resolve and good cheer to persevere in the days ahead!

Eight years ago, I started this blog to separate the wheat from the chaff of the business opportunities I found online.

It’s been a fun ride and one that I couldn’t have kept up this long without my loyal readers. Over 100,000 of you subscribe to this blog and read it daily in your email, via RSS or in your browser. Thousands more stumble onto it every day as they search the internet for legitimate business ideas and opportunities.

This blog has allowed me to work for myself, from home and to meet thousands of other entrepreneurs and opportunity seekers. It’s been a an incredible blessing and I look forward to doing it for many more years to come.

Thank you!

From Dane’s blog

I believe more people than ever will be wanting to have a “Plan B” for generating extra cash…

For improving their small business marketing…

For taking ideas that work in one field and applying them to their business…

So I’m assembling resources.

In fact, I already mentioned one … about how to “Put Paul Harvey to work for you!”

But there’s lots more information that needs to be assembled and made available.

So that’s what I’m working on now… how to deliver as much free information as possible on valid, low cost, IDEAS to help you make money at home or in a small business.

So that’s what I’m hard at work trying to hatch now.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving!

All the “home remedies” we tend to prefer were COMPLETELY USELESS. In fact, they were little more than messy and unproductive. So while thanking our Nashville Dermatologist, I want to give people like us who are prone to think “natural remedies only” a head’s up.  Sometimes you need to see a specialist we found. The stuff we’d ordinarily try was use than worthless.

By going to a dermatologist in Nashville, we got access to therapies that worked quickly. Started getting results in terms of less pain in a few days. The results actually took HALF the time the dermatologist said. We’re grateful for that and the fact that the treatments were covered 100% by our insurance except for the co-pays of course.

The science behind dermatology is such that there were several options available to us. One even involved “prescription” light therapy.  That’s “natural” the way we like it. We opted for some other treatments in addition and they worked well for us. So we’d counsel people to be aware that sometimes they need to consult a specialist and that the health products we sell as home based business people may not be sufficient. Thankfully there was a Nashville Dermatologist we were able to consult.

Ordinarily, WordPress blogs have “no follow” commands to Google in their comment section. When blog owners like our network install software plugins like the one from Semiologic it disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments.

WordPress enables that as a default option so spammers will get no benefit from their work.

But that also penalizes thoughtful comments which I want to reward.

Though we have a huge spam blocker in place, still junk makes it through occasionally which I delete manually.

In the past, my practice has been to delete any comment where, instead of a name, someone put the SEO term they wanted to rank for. I considered them all spam. This does have the legitimate purpose of boosting page rank. I will not penalize the “little guy” (or “big guy”) trying to help themselves by commenting in this way.

Here is my new policy:

1. You may place your seo term instead of a name. BUT you must include your first name at the end of the blog post.
2. The comment must be ON TOPIC and something besides simply “Wow, great blog!” or other off topic phrases, though all sincere compliments are indeed welcome as part of an on topic comment.
3. If you put your link again, Google invalidates it anyway. I’m likely to invalidate it too. I have limited time and these look remarkably like spam to me. So, since you need only one seo optimized link in the comment, just lead with that, leave a comment and your first name and you will have your one way link!

Happy Marketing.

Here’s how to find more of those page rank passing one way blog links to your site.

I haven’t wanted to announce it too soon, I was afraid it’d die on me.

But I finally have high speed at my home! Woo hoo!

Before I was doing most of it on 26K dial up!

I can’t exactly figure out why because – for free – we’ve been out telling people about their service. Local people have been seeing the tower go up and asking me about it.

I know they’re busy.

I suppose the prospect that we will be getting high speed as the dial up seems to deteriorate in service is getting us a bit jumpy!

I was hoping that the receiver/transponder would  be up and running yesterday afternoon giving us broadband access… then a whole new world of VOIP and SKYPE would open up.

But I’m still waiting.

Can you tell I’m excited?

I wonder if there are entrepreneurs near you who do this kind of thing if you’re in the same boat?