Local Explorations - Hello from Lake Ontario&#39s Waterfront Trail

Local Explorations - Hello from Lake Ontario's Waterfront Trail

 by: Susanne Pacher

In our neck of the woods the summer has been absolutely gorgeous, a little on the hot and humid side occasionally, but I am unable to recall a summer that has been so warm and sunny as this summer of 2005.

The weekend before last I just felt like exploring the local area a little bit and since I was unable to pry my husband away from watching some of the season's first football games, I struck out on my own and laid out an itinery for a little local discovery. I've said it before - this website is about exploration and discovery, locally and abroad. The places right underneath our noses often have so many things to discover, we don't always need to get a plane ride away to uncover something new.

Since we spent so much time along Toronto's waterfront during my brother's visit, and since I am big suck for water in all shapes and forms, I thought let's stretch the envelope a little further east and see what Lake Ontario has to offer outside of Toronto's eastern city limits. More specifically, let's check out the shoreline and Lake Ontario's Waterfront Trail.

The Waterfront Trail extends for a total of 740 km and stretches all the way from Niagara-on-the-Lake in the southwest to Brockville in the east. Of course, 740 km in a day would be a bit much, so I focussed my explorations on the communities just east of Toronto: Pickering, Ajax and Whitby.

I started just on the west side of Toronto's city limits at the estuary of the Rouge River, which forms part of a protected nature preserve. The river flows out in a lagoon setting and joins the lake just outside a long extended finger of sand, right beside a beautiful sandy beach. A video production company was just shooting a soca music video and the footbridge over the Rouge River was actually blocked off by the film crew. That didn't deter a bunch of fishermen underneath the railway bridge from casting their lures in hopes of catching the big one.

My next stop was Pickering, the first community east of Toronto. I went down to the Liverpool Beachfront Park, which houses a brand new very attractive Cape Code style housing development, a marina and a restaurant surrounded by a marsh just inland from the shoreline. At the beachfront of Frenchman's Bay there are various recreation facilities and the boardwalk takes you right up to the fences of the Pickering Nuclear Power Station.

Back in the car I went and I scoped out the next city further east: Ajax, which has a beautiful waterfront. I parked my car at Rotary Park which has a nice pavillion with a food concession, put on my inline skates and rolled eastwards past the Ajax Waterfront Park and Harwood Gardens to the east end of the Waterfront Park. Virtually all of downtown Ajax' waterfront is parkland and near Lion's Point and Harwood Gardens the shoreline is elevated, with many benches to sit down and rest and gaze out onto the infinite horizons of Lake Ontario.

I made a brief stop in Whitby, but by that time my stomach was growling and the nagging feeling in my digestive system made me decide to explore this area in more detail another time. I figured I gotta leave some of the nice stuff for next time.

After almost 20 years in Canada I had never explored these parts of Lake Ontario's shoreline and I was amazed at how many beautiful spots I found. As fall approaches, I am planning to extend my discoveries and head out to discover some of Ontario's brilliant fall colours and get to know my local neck of the woods a little better.

About The Author Susanne Pacher is the publisher of a website called Travel and Transitions (http://www.travelandtransitions.com). Travel and Transitions deals with unconventional travel and is chock full of advice, tips, real life travel experiences, interviews with travellers and travel experts, insights and reflections, cross-cultural issues, contests and many other features. You will also find stories about life and the transitions that we face as we go through our own personal life-long journeys. Submit your own travel stories in our first travel story contest (http://www.travelandtransitions.com/contests.htm) and have a chance to win an amazing adventure cruise on the Amazon River. "Life is a Journey Explore New Horizons". The story with photos is published at Travel and Transitions – Insights and Reflections (http://www.travelandtransitions.com/stories_photos/hello_waterfront_trail.htm).

How To Have Great Ideas

How To Have Great Ideas

 by: Steve Gillman

Want to have great ideas? You could try waiting to see if they pop into your head someday, and they honestly might. However, if you want a more systematic method you can use today, here it is in three simple steps:

1. Get knowledge in the area in which you want the ideas.

2. Use idea-generating techniques.

3. Choose the best ideas from the results.

Great Ideas Start With Knowledge

You wouldn't expect to come up with a new theory of relativity if you had no knowledge in physics or mathematics. You need some degree of knowledge in the area in which you want new ideas. For truly great ideas, it helps to have a great deal of knowledge.

To create a new transportation device, for example, you would want general knowledge in that field, as well as more specific knowledge. This might include knowing a little about all the current modes of transportation. You might add to that a list of things that have been tried and failed, and a list of all the things that people want in their transportation.

Great Ideas From Techniques

Ideas and inventions start in the mind, and the mind follows certain patterns and rules. This is why tools such as problem solving techniques and other idea generating techniques work so well. Consider the "concept combination" technique, for example. Tell your mind that you need a useful combination of a plane and a motorcycle, and it will search until it finds it. This mind took twenty seconds to imagine wings that expand out at high speed from a motorcycle, allowing it to glide right off the edge of a cliff.

The technique of redefining problems in many ways can open whole new areas to explore. Redefining "inexpensive homes" as "ways to help people afford homes" has lead to all sorts of new financing methods that have made it easier to buy a home even as prices have risen. If "better job" becomes "better way to make money" you open a whole range of possibilities. There are dozens of great idea generating techniques to choose from, each with it's own advantage.

Many Ideas To Choose From

The more ideas you come up with, the more likely you are to find good ones to work with. This is why you should learn the systematic ways to produce new concepts. Finally, if "great" means "important" to you, you need to work in important areas. There's nothing wrong with inventing a better clothes hanger, but if you want to change the world, start working on new ways to save the environment, ways to end hunger, new political processes that avert wars and other great ideas.

About The Author Steve Gillman has been exploring new ideas for decades. Visit his site for invention ideas, business ideas, story ideas, political and economic theories, deep thoughts, and to get a free course on How To Have New Ideas: http://www.999ideas.com.

Dear Affiliate Manager: Are You Hoarding Your Articles?

Dear Affiliate Manager: Are You Hoarding Your Articles?

 by: Nicole Dean

Question: My affiliates keep bugging me about my articles. Why do they want my articles and should I let them have them? What do I get out of it?

Dear Affiliate Manager,

You hit on my pet peeve. Stop hoarding your articles already! Do you want your affiliates to promote your program repeatedly to their lists and on their sites or don’t you? Isn’t the goal to get your website exposure all over the internet? The more sales your affiliates make – the more money you’ll BOTH make.

My favorite affiliate programs are the ones which provide me with articles or brandable ebooks. These marketers understand what it’s like to be an affiliate who wants to make money. Make it easy for me to promote your product repeatedly. Give me quality articles I can use on my websites, in my newsletter and in my blog with my affiliate link included. Don’t just shove a link at me and say “good luck”. It’s not exactly motivating me to go sell your product. Hey, if you don’t give me the tools I want, your competition will.

And, let me clarify something. Providing free affiliate articles with links to your other websites in it, bypassing your affiliates – that’s just wrong. Please don’t make the article leaky by adding several self-promoting links in the body of the article. As an affiliate, I don’t want to promote your other programs and send you leads out of sheer generosity. Although I am a nice person and I’m happy to promote good products, I’m not donating my time to promote your products. First, the products have to be good. Secondly, all things equal, I have to be able to feed my family in the process. Stealing commissions from your own affiliates is just wrong on many levels.

So, what can you do to start building a loyal army of affiliates today? Put yourself in their shoes. They’ve signed up for your program because they believe in your products and in your reputation. Show them that you view your affiliates as partners and you’ll have loyalty that you can’t buy at any price.

About The Author Nicole Dean is on a mission to find a few good affiliate programs. She’s found a handful of programs that don’t stink. Check them out at http://www.freeaffiliatearticles.com/free-affiliate-programs.htm and be sure to grab some Free Affiliate Articles while you're there.

How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites

How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites

 by: Peter Lopez

If you want your visitors to come back again and again, you've got to get them to add your website to their favorites (also known as bookmarks in some browsers). That's the menu where they can save websites that they want to use again, clicking them easily to get to them. Being added to a user's favorites is like getting an ad for your website right there in their browser's menu, for nothing. But how can you do it?

Make it Easy

The option to add a website to the favorites menu is quite hidden, and people don't often think about it. You'll get far more people adding you to their favorites if you offer them a quick and easy 'Add this Site to my Favorites' link somewhere towards the top of the page. Even if they don't actually use the link, it still draws attention to the browser's favorites function and makes the user think about it, increasing the likelihood of them adding the site to their favorites sooner or later.

Pay Attention to the Title

Once your site is in people's favorites, of course, it's not going to do you much good if they can't find it again later. You need to make sure that the name and purpose of your site is clearly stated in its title, as that's all they'll have to go on when they're looking through their favorites. Make it long enough to be specific, but not so long that it looks self-important or information gets lost off the end.

Tracking Who's Done It

It can be difficult to know who's coming in to your site using a favorite they saved. Usually, you would look at the referrer to see where they came from but if they type the web address or use a favorite the referrer will be blank. There's no way of telling which of those two things they did unless you send people who use your bookmark link to a special address for example www.example.com/bookmark. However, this method is not foolproof because not everyone who adds your site to their favorites will use your link to do it.

Promise Updates

If you want people to add your site to their favorites then you need to give them a reason to come back. The best way to do this is to make it clear exactly how often your website is updated. You might write at the top of your website 'updated weekly' or you might simply write the date when you last updated the website. The second way only works if you update your website often.

Could You Be Their Homepage?

Of course, if you want to go even further than just getting people to add your website to their favorites then you should consider trying to get people to make your website their homepage. That is, the website that loads automatically when they first open their web browser and that they get back to when they click on their home button. If you can get your website as someone's homepage even for a relatively short length of time then they are likely to see your website dozens of times in a day.

So how can you get people to set your website as their homepage? It's a little more difficult than just getting them to add your site to their favorites as it works differently in different web browsers. In Internet Explorer you can give people a link that makes your website their homepage automatically. For other web browsers, however, you will need to give the visitor a set of instructions. This will require some research on your part but will generally be instructions on how to open the web browsers options or preferences menu and use the section that allows the homepage to be set manually.

Before people will make you their homepage, though, you need to offer them the kinds of things that they might want on a homepage. You can't just expect your own content to be enough, you need to give them other things too, such as local weather or a box that they can type searches into to search the whole web using a popular search engine.

About The Author Peter Lopez is a full time webmaster for dozens of websites. He runs a hugely popular website called http://www.webmasteradvice.net aimed at helping webmasters from around the world.

Swedish Rubbish

Swedish Rubbish

 by: Gerry Coburn

This week I want to talk about cardboard. Ah I can see you turning the page already, but hold on for just a moment. Let me bring you on a journey. You had purchased a table and chairs from Argus. The boxes have now arrived two days later. You have said goodbye to the driver of the large white van with Argus stencilled on the side. (So much for passing your new furniture off as Habitat originals to the neighbours. You think to your self why they can’t deliver at 3am.) You close the door and eagerly get your Son in Law to move the boxes into the kitchen. You tear open the boxes. Reveal the beautiful new furniture and after two hours of post assembly you sit back and are unable to see them. You can’t see them because of the huge amounts of cardboard now littering your Italian tiled floor. What to do. Break them up; fold them over and over until they are the thickness of a small child. Picking them up you go into the back garden and try and squeeze them into your black bin. They won’t fit, you sigh and plonk them behind the bin and try to forget about them.

Well I am recently arrived in Sweden and as is the custom here I went to IKEA to purchase furniture. Apartments here come unfurnished. Well at least they do in the Dixon apartments – Dixon’s are one of four major trust fund properties owners in Gothenburg. My girlfriend is a Dixon babe and thus we have a Dixon apartment but more about that in another letter – surfice to say they don’t have rental agencies in Sweden. In IKEA we purchased an armchair, TV unit, curtains, a table and lots and lots of cushions for about 2000sk (220 euro).I drew the line at getting a couch, they come in boxes the size of a town house in Meath Street and to be honest I am unsure our relationship can take the strain of it’s complicated assembly. We get home and for the next three hours we assemble and drink coffee and assemble and we don’t argue. ( later I am told that if you build IKEA products and you don’t argue with your loved ones you are blessed with eternal love, however the big test is to build a couch (so I was right) , not arguing during that build actually means that you must get married straight away and the government pays for it. )

Anyway after the building has been completed we are left with, and I don’t wish to exaggerate here, about three tons of cardboard. I sit on the new armchair and sigh. AM doesn’t look perturbed, maybe I think to myself that she has not yet thought about the issue of disposal in so much as she is still high on the eternal love in the room. I don’t wish to bring her down to earth yet so I just kind of kick the card board with my foot and I sigh again. She looks at me. What’s wrong with you she asks? I point at the cardboard mountain and ask what will we do with the cardboard? I am about to add that if she thinks I am spending the new three hours bending and twisting it into disposable shapes she is very much mistaken. But she says “put it in the Sopprummet, when you bring the bins down”. Sopprummet means garbage room. I hadn’t been there yet. My recently arrival had allowed me a period of grace from the general daily household tasks. Apparently that period was now over. I mutter something about bins in Europe not big enough to take the cardboard, but she has disappeared into the kitchen to eat cereal with yoghurt, probably. I rise and pick up as much of the cardboard as possible. I tuck it under my arm and make my way down to the Sopprummet. I dump the cardboard at the door of this garage like structure that sits in the communal courtyard. I have a key to open the door and when I do so I am reflected in the glory of government controlled recycling. To visualise it, think when Honey Bunny opens the case in pulp fiction.

For all I know the contents of that brief case was an easy way to recycle cardboard. I stand with my mouth open. Inside this innoxious garage sits the Mecca of recycling. Along one wall sits huge bins. Each with helpful photographs illuminating which refuse it takes. Glass, paper, food, green glass, aluminium cans, tin cans, and an extra large bin for cardboard. I am surprised the picture on the front of the cardboard bin is not one of IKEA and a table. I set the door so it sits open and I lug the cardboard into the garage.

I open the bin for the cardboard and I plonk the offending packaging in to it. It fits, I am rid of it, and I didn’t even have to bend or manipulate it in any way. And I am doing the planet a service. Quickly I pop back upstairs and I grab anything and everything that needs to be thrown out. I run gleefully back to the Sopprummet and pass a fruitful 20 minutes putting things into the right bins. I know understand why , as a child, we spend so much time putting square pegs into square holes and round pegs into round holes. It was training for a recycling utopia. When I am finished I put the empty plastic bags in the plastic bag bins and I feel good. I actually feel happy. Why do I feel happy? Because it was so easy! It was just so easy. To do some good for the planet and to save myself from having to spend two hours sitting on various sizes of cardboard.

I lock the garage and almost skip back up the stairs to our second floor apartment. I am ready to volunteer myself as the person in the apartment in charge of rubbish. I mean in a more literal sense that the current title my friends have for me. AM is washing her cereal bowl and she stares at me. I grin at her and go sit on the armchair. “Maybe”, I tell her in the tone of one happy with the world, “we should buy a couch?”

About The Author Gerry Coburn is a 29 year old smoker who once felt Björk’s bottom in Thurles in Co. Tipperary. He once fell in love with a Swedish girl. Upon wakening he found himself living in Sweden. He now writes articles for his website www.gothenburg-city.com. He finds money annoying. Copyright © www.gothenburg-city.com.

Make Money In Your Underwear With Passive Income

Make Money In Your Underwear With Passive Income

 by: Kristie Tamsevicius

Every online dream begins with the vision of opening your email box and “like magic” the money comes rolling in. It’s true -- building a passive income is your key to earning more money without working harder. While it’s unlikely you’ll earn millions overnight, building a passive income is a smart way to supplement your existing income. Here are some ideas for how you can build an automatic income source for your online business.

AFFILIATE PRODUCT PROGRAMS

Affiliate programs allow you to earn income selling other people’s products. There are literally THOUSANDS of affiliate programs that you can sign up for in every category imaginable. Whether you are interested in selling ebooks, toys, magazines, or kitchen utensils, I guarantee there is a shop in that category with an affiliate program.

Here are some criteria to use when selecting an affiliate program. Choose a quality product that you personally believe in. You need to actually try and buy the product yourself. This allows you to personally buy into what’s great about the product so you can write a killer personal testimonial. Additionally, try to find products that offer higher than average commissions. Why work your buns off selling a 5% commission product, when you can sell one that offers 30, 40, or even 50% commissions?

If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You can investigate a company by Checking them out with the Better Business Bureau in the business’ native state. http://search.bbb.org/search.html

CREATING YOUR OWN INFOPRODUCTS

What is your secret to success? Success sells, and if you have your own personal method to getting there, others will pay to hear it. That’s why ebooks on how to succeed are topping the sales charts. Ask yourself, “What you know that is special, unique, and could help others?” The answer to that will make a successful infoproduct.

=> Do you know how to:

fix something, find something, save something, do something more quickly, do it better,

do it more efficiently, do a greater amount of it, do it with greater quality, do it less expensively, do it more easily, do it more often, be happier doing it, do it automatically, or more effectively, take existing knowledge and apply to a new situation

CREATING YOUR OWN SYSTEM OR SOFTWARE

Franklin Covey has created a whole income by showing others the secrets to his prioritization and organization. He packaged his methodology and sells the tools, classes, and equipment to help people achieve those same results. http://www.franklincovey.com. Do you have a unique form, software, or process that you use that makes your work easier? Document your process, find a developer to package your software, or package your process as an infoproduct, cd, teleclass, or ecourse.

RESELLER OF SERVICES

As a businessperson, your customers will often ask for recommendations for reputable service companies. This puts you in the perfect position to earn commissions reselling those goods and services. Make a list of all the services your customers use. For example, as a web developer my customers use hosting, merchant accounts, shopping carts, newsletter broadcasting services, and domain name vendors. Here is a list of the top 50 reseller programs to get you started. http://www.webaffiliateprograms.com/.

PARTNER COMMISSIONS

Do you recommend consultants services to others? Often my customers need assistance with proofreading, multi-browser compatibility testing, copywriting, virtual assistance, and animated graphics. I have sought out partnerships with companies in these key areas. When I refer a client to them, they pay me a referral fee and vice versa. Who do you know that you could create similar deals with?

ADVERTISING SALES

You may be sitting on valuable real estate and not even know it. If your web site gets lots of traffic or you have a popular ezine, you may be able to earn income through advertising sales. Some ideas for how to package your advertising packages can include banner ads, text ads, sponsorships, partnerships, paid classifieds or business directory listings. Another ideas is to create “co-branded” paid or free ebooks with advertising space.

REFERRAL NETWORK

Think about who your audience is, and then ask yourself, what other types of professionals have the SAME target audience. By creating your own referral network, you can charge businesses to become a member and agree to promote them to your audience. This is on the idea of how the 1-800-Dentist concept works. Dentists pay a fee to be part of the dentist network. When someone phones 1-800-Dentist asking for a dentist in their area, they look at their list of dentists and match you up with one bearing the qualifications you are seeking. Then 1-800 Dentist gets a small commission from the dentist for sending them a qualified customer.

For an idea of how this can work in a web application, you could create a preferred network of web developers. Web developing companies pay a small fee to be included in your referral network. Then offer an area on your site where people can search to find a web developer in their area. When a visitor signs up with one of the web developers in your network, you get a commission.

THE PAY PER INCLUSION CLUB

If you are an expert in your field, you can create a community where others can learn your secrets to success. By offering a free level of membership, you can allow visitors to poke around and see that you know your stuff. Then you can offer them a paid membership to your member’s only section. Internet Marketing Challenge is one such community built by Internet Marketers geared toward the aspiring entrepreneurial crowd. CoachVille by Thomas Leonard is another community built for the business/personal coaching audience.

SUMMARY

According to Think and Grow Rich, the wealthy of the world are people who have a brilliant idea that has changed the world. I believe that those who resell those brilliant ideas will become rich. Take advantage of the power of passive income and you too can be working less and earning more!

About The Author Kristie Tamsevicius, is the author of "I Love My Life: A Mom's Guide to Working from Home"! Thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs have used her step-by-step home business system to earn money working from home. Get a free ecourse Home Business Success Secrets at http://www.webmomz.com/ilovemylife1.htm.

Put Muscle Behind Your Web Site With Web Analytics

Put Muscle Behind Your Web Site With Web Analytics

 by: Richard Radcliffe

Your business has a web site. You were careful in selecting a designer who understood how crucial your site is to your marketing strategy, and who had the skills to integrate and present your content in a way that fulfills that strategy. It's well designed and optimized. Now you can just sit back and wait for the profits to roll in right? Wrong!

A well designed web site is just the beginning. A good marketing strategy never stops improving, and your web site is a vital marketing tool. How do you improve its effectiveness in bringing in more and more leads and turning higher and higher percentages of those leads into conversions?

You do this by understanding everything you can about the people who visit your site. How did the visitor find your site? Did they find you from a link pointing to your site, a search engine? What keywords did they use for that search? How long did that visitor stay at your site? What did they look at? What didn't they look at? How far into a payment process did they get before they abandoned the purchase? What prevented them from becoming a customer?

Knowing the answers to questions like these is extremely important in order for you to refine your web site. You want to to use more of what is working for you and get rid of content that doesn't work for you. It will also keep your site up to date in an ever changing marketplace. Now how do you get this information?

The answer is 'web analytics'. Web analytics gathers information about what visitors do when they are at your web site, and then organizes that data into reports you can customize to suit your needs. Analytics can either be hosted online by a provider of the service or can be purchased as a program that you own and manage. There are many different venders of web analytic services.

Analytics packages can be hosted for as low as $30 per month and this price goes up as the amount of data tracking increases. Programs, on the other hand, will vary in cost from free trial versions with very few features, to costing thousands of dollars for complete, full spectrum tracking. Knowing what you need to know about your visitors, will help you decide the level of tracking features you need to get the most out of your web site.

It is important to look at the information gathered in these reports, at the very least, on a weekly basis, and to make changes to your web site based on this information. Trust the data, not your expectations of what your potential customers want. Web analytics is a powerful marketing weapon and sets apart those who are serious about having a web site that significantly enhances their business, from those who are not.

About The Author Richard Radcliffe is a Web Designer/Consultant, writer, and father of a 6 year old son. He is the owner of Renshaw Design which specializes in web design and web marketing consultation for small businesses, nonprofits, clubs, and professionals with a private practice. Visit his site at http://www.renshaw-design.com.