Ryne Landers-Lover. Fighter. Gamer. Internet Entrepreneur Extraordinaire!

So,

Apparently the iPhone has had some tethering capabilities in Europe for quite a while now. Gizmodo has posted a detailed guide to installing this application (as opposed to an outright “app”), and you can read all about it. I’ve got the little piece of software, and it works completely. I gotta admit, I’ve used tethering before, with mixed results, so I wasn’t too thrilled to be replacing my dedicated aircard with my iPhone. But, the simple fact is that if you just need to use it occasionally, and for a little bit of time, it can save you literally  hundreds of dollars per year.

On top of this, the connection is pretty fast. Here’s  a speed test I ran in the Dallas area with my laptop tethered to my iPhone.

As you can see, the AT&T network tops out at over 2mbs here, which is pretty respectable. Occasionally I’ll hit 3. Of course, this is nothing compared to the speed of 4G networks, and the latency is the big issue when uploading files or playing games, but for busy, on the go entrepreneurs, this is an amazing way to save money and multitask anywhere, anytime.

If you have an iPhone and would like to know where to find the file, email me ryne (at) l7marketingsolutions (dawt) com and I’ll let you know where to find it.

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Mark Cuban, famed online entrepreneur and Dallas Mavs owner, had an awesome post this last week on his personal blog. He titled it “The most patriotic thing you can do”. Essentially, Mark laid out the idea that the most patriotic thing you could do is to “bust your ass and get rich” (his words, but I couldn’t have said it any better). Basically, you have to look at the “rich is evil” argument like this: the overwhelming majority of taxes in the United States (upward of 70%) are paid by the wealthiest tier of people in America. Additionally, the successful entrepreneurs are the people out there starting companies, creating approximately 60-80% of new jobs in the US in the last decade, according to the Small Business Administration of America (http://www.sbaonline.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.pdf). Additionally, small businesses account for more than half of the GDP and pay nearly 45% of the private sector payroll in the US.

As you can see, “Greed is Good”, as Gordon Gecko famously once said.Go out there, bust your ass, make a ton of money, and then have fun with it. Your fun employs people, and your taxes subsidize government aid programs and our military.

Read the full article here: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/13/the-most-patriotic-thing-you-can-do/

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JOINT VENTURE MARKETING, A RECIPE FOR MARKETING SUCCESS

If you’re reading this, you have to know that no matter what type of marketing you’re in, Joint Ventures will greatly increase your chance of success in building a lasting income.  In every partnership, each party must know their strengths and weaknesses.  Equally important, is determining who will be responsible for various parts of your joint business.  Once you’ve covered all your bases (killer product(s), capital outlay, promotions of the product(s), etc…) you can get started building your dream.

All things being equal, properly executed Joint Ventures have the incredible potential for exploding your income, increasing your list building, and opening the doors to a lot more business opportunities.

What are the key strategies to forming a profitable Joint Venture?  First of all you need to identify those people you interact with, to determine who has skills, knowledge, and credibility that is willing to share what they know with you.  You might equate this process to the “needle in the haystack” approach.  There are a lot of people today who don’t want to share their skills and secrets.  No surprise there, but you can still find those that desire success and are willing to help others who have the same goals, achieve it.  Once you’ve decided on whom you’d like to work with, you must create a plan that you can present to them which outlines the mutual benefits of working together.  The laws of reciprocity definitely come into play.  Each of you is helping the other focus on the “Team” approach of making the partnership a long term relationship.  Once you’ve found your partner, you have to take action and look at your target audience, and what it is you want to market to them.

Assuming you have a product in mind, you have two options, create the product or promote the product of someone else.  By determining what’s Hot, what it is people want, you’ll direct your efforts to finding the product and then promoting it like there’s no tomorrow.  Naturally you have to have an audience to promote this to, and I’d be the first to suggest that you “don’t put the cart before the horse”.  In any joint venture, you either come to the table with a list, or determine the quickest way to get one.  You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don’t have someone to market it to, your Joint Venture will struggle to get off the ground floor and will more than likely take longer than you anticipated, to make a profit.

No matter the size of your list, you will always want to expand it, and this takes time.  So consider writing articles that get you exposure, speak at every opportunity you get, network with others, promote webinars, teleseminars, and use all of your Social Media outlets to start building credibility.  If more and more of your audience see you as an authority, the contact list will grow.  Contrary to what the internet guru’s tell you, this process doesn’t happen over night, and it’s not always easy, so don’t throw in the towel.  You might not instantly strike it rich on your first try, but Joint Ventures are truly one of the best recipes for improved chances of lasting success in internet marketing.

Until Next Time – Ryne Landers, L7 Marketing Solutions.

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If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you probably have been using a third party program to manage all of your contacts and conversations. I like to use Tweetdeck; it is by far the most popular, and it’s very simple to use. If you’re like me, and you’ve been usingTweetdeck or another program for a while, you probably missed Twitter’s recently revamped home page. The new homepage is much smaller and more streamlined than the old home page.

Twitter's new home page has a more search-oriented design

Twitter’s new homepage is set up now as a search engine. This is very powerful stuff. Internet marketers and bloggers have been expounding Twitter’s search abilities for months now. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, in an August 5^th post stated that “It’s time to think of Twitter as a search engine.”

Twitter can be thought of as the anti-Google. Google builds links based on authority, trends, and statistics. Twitter, on the other hands, builds trends that it displays based solely off of the participation of its users. Twitter is a collection of emotional search terms. It’s a search engine that tells you how people are feeling about keywords or subjects, rather than how old that keyword or subject is, how it’s been trending for the past 5 years (Google Trends), or which site is more authoritative on the subject.

With Twitter, you search not for the price of items, but rather what people’s experiences with the products and services have been.  Was the product of good quality or poor? How were you treated by the company’s customer service? These are the kinds of questions that are typically harder for Google to address, but are perfectly suited for Twitter’s social environment.

As more people are beginning to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time, companies are starting to take notice. Large companies, such as Delta Airlines, maintain a dedicated Twitter team, whose job it is to scour Twitter in real time and address customer complaints or re-tweet good reviews. I was even surprised earlier this year when Palm messaged me directly, thanking me for talking about the Palm Pre. After I tweeted about it some more (I love the Pre-it’s awesome), Palm even re-tweeted a tweet of mine. Very cool.

As a business, this provides you invaluable data and opportunity for growth. Growth is fueled by making a positive impact on customers, and truly engaging them. The data you gather from Twitter will tell you whether or not your product is a success, what its highs and lows are, and what you can do to improve it and your marketing efforts.

As a strategic move, Twitter is positioning itself to be a rival to Google and Yahoo, but in a very different way. Perhaps this new search will one day gain the volume and credibility of traditional search, while not stepping on their traditional search brethren’s toes. I can’t wait to see it.

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I saw this video from someone who posted it on Twitter. I think it’s hilarious; Glenn Beck doesn’t deliver his lines with quite the smooth demeanor as John Stewart, but his speech is definitely 100% as effective.

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