Your audience wants a reason to pay attention and get involved.

This means you CAN’T just do things the same old way. “That’s the way we have always done things” should immediately send up warnings that your thinking needs to change before it’s too late.

Your objective is to make a deeper connection with your customer. To get inside their head so that they think of you in a positive way… especially when they are ready to buy what you are selling.

Ask yourself, “what are we doing now that we can offer in a new, entertaining and rewarding way that adds value to our customer?”

Here is a simple but highly effective example: If you fly commercial airlines more than once or twice then you are probably very familiar with the flight attendants’ presentation on how to buckle the seat belt, put on the oxygen mask, where the exits are located, what to do in the event of a water landing and where the instructional brochure is located. It’s important information but it gets stale pretty quickly. If you have seen it once then you have seen it a hundred times. Doesn’t much matter what plane you are on or what airline you fly, does it?

If you fly regularly then you might not even bother to watch the presentation any more, opting to read the free magazine instead.

This is one area that innovative airlines can ask themselves, “How can we make this boring but important info more engaging so that our customers pay attention and get value from it?”

Watch this short video to see a great example of one airline’s entertaining solution.

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What Is A Joint Venture?

Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

“A joint venture (often abbreviated JV) is an entity formed between two or more parties to undertake economic activity together. The parties agree to create a new entity by both contributing equity, and they then share in the revenues, expenses, and control of the enterprise. The venture can be for one specific project only, or a continuing business relationship such as the Sony Ericsson joint venture. This is in contrast to a strategic alliance, which involves no equity stake by the participants, and is a much less rigid arrangement.

Organizations can also form joint ventures, for example, a child welfare organization in the Midwest initiated a joint venture whose mission is to develop and service client tracking software for human service organizations. The five partners all sit on the joint venture corporation’s board, and together have been able to provide the community with a much-needed resource.

The phrase generally refers to the purpose of the entity and not to a type of entity. Therefore, a joint venture may be a corporation, limited liability company, partnership or other legal structure, depending on a number of considerations such as tax and tort liability.”

There are different types of JV deals but the fastest and easiest is probably the endorsed internet joint venture. An endorsed JV is when the company or individual that you are partnering with endorses or recommends your products or services to the customers on their mailing list. One of the reasons that this can be so successful is that your partner already has an established relationship or rapport with everyone on their list… a customer base who values their opinion.

Now there is another way to leverage the value of internet joint ventures beyond simply tapping into somebody else’s mailing list.

You could spend thousands of dollars buying programs from various marketing guru’s. Then you could spend months learning how to do all of the various steps required to build an internet business. I’ll cover the detail on what’s involved in producing and launching your own electronic and physical products in future posts. Here’s a short sample list of some of the tasks that you will face:

• Idea development
• Niche market research
• Content development
• Video production
• Text production (electronic and/or physical)
• Graphic design
• Photography
• Web site development
• List building
• SEO
• Traffic generation
• Deliverability
• Testing and refinement

And that’s just the product side of your business. You also need to consider:

• Accounting
• Business structure (sole proprietorship vs. incorporating)
• Taxes
• Regulatory Compliance
• Employee management
• Payroll
• Expenses

Starting to get the picture? There is too much for one person to do. This is one of the main reasons people never take action on their ideas. Another key reason is uncertainty of what to do next.

Or you could follow Rich Scheffren’s advice and outsource all of the functions that you can’t or don’t like to do yourself and hire an experienced, successful business development and marketing team. Having the experts at Duvall Media on your team speeds the process and greatly increases your chances for success.

You can see our scope of services on the About page. No internet hype, just real world experience from the trenches of the business battlefront.

We are looking to team up with entrepreneurs like you who have great ideas but who need help getting them produced and launched. You bring the idea, passion and expertise and we’ll bring the business experience. Together we can produce real products and real profits.

Be sure to subscribe to begin your joint venture project today.

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We’re a web video production company specializing in internet marketing. Instead of posting my videos onto our own server, I had been loading them to Vimeo and then embedding them onto my sites.

This created a problem for interested prospects because they weren’t seeing my entire video production  history on the site in one easy to use location. I realized that I needed to put my videos on my website so my prospects could see samples of my work.

I found a pretty cool plugin for WordPress that adds a sweet video gallery to any post or page on your site. It’s called TubePress.

I use it for my case studies to showcase the various web videos we produce for our clients. It is set to pull videos from your YouTube and Vimeo accounts. The easiest way to make sure your gallery isn’t showing unrelated videos or other people’s videos is to create albums.

I set up an album for each client and then add their videos to their album as I upload the video.

Then I create a post that explains the client project, copy and paste the album ID number into the TubePress code snippet and then add the code snippet to at the end of the post. The TubePress code snippet tells your Worpress site to show videos from that album.

Pretty easy to use and it displays the videos nicely. You can even play the videos by simply clicking their thumbnail image. And you can do this without leaving your site.

I use and highly recommend this plugin.

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I’ve been searching for a way to coordinate project elements with the various members of  the project team.

For example, our creative director needs to keep track of the photography, writing, graphic design, and printing as well as who’s responsible for each task, the deadlines, etc.

I need to keep track of what videos have been shot, if they have been edited & approved, the website installation, keyword research, domains, optimization, video syndication, bookmarks and who’s doing each part.

That’s a lot to keep track of.

I have looked at various web-based services to help me collaborate and manage projects but most services get expensive, and tend to require a fair amount of set-up. Plus, I have to log-in to another site to access the information.

This gets to be a real pain which means I won’t stick with it for very long.

I eventually found a solution using a web-based platform that I am already familiar with, I use daily, requires no learning curve, is easy to set-up and is FREE. It’s a simple plugin called CollabPress that adds project management features to your WordPress dashboard.

Simply add your team members as users, create a project then add tasks. You assign tasks to your team members and set due dates. The plugin notifies your team members by email every time a task is assigned to them. When the task is completed, simply check the box and it puts a line through the task title showing it’s done. It’s highlighted in red if past due and in green if still on time.

The email that’s sent to team members includes the task title, details, who assigned the task, deadline and a link to the task in the dashboard. You can also add comments as status updates, ask for input, make changes, offer suggestions, indicate if the project is paid, etc.

All-in-all, CollabPress is a pretty handy plugin for managing your pojects with team members. I like it and recommend it.

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