Here are some “bad” ways to quickly raise money for a good cause. These methods are not very politically correct and might even be illegal in your area. That being said these methods just might help be able to raise a lot of money for charity from people that like drinking, gambling and the occasional threat of blackmail.

#1 - Open Bar

Most twenty somethings love an open bar. Talk with your local pub and see if they will be willing to support your charity fundraising. Many bars will charge around $20 depending on what is included and for how many hours. If you sell tickets at $40, you are raising about $20 per person. To make sure you get as many people as possible ask your 5 closest friends to each bring 3 other people. That will give you at least 15 and at least $300. You will get the best deal from the bar if your open bar is during a slow time for them. Don’t be lazy and just ask 5 people to come. Tell 20 people to each bring several friends and to broadcast email it and remind everyone its for charity. I have been able to over 100 people at my open bar parties.
#2 - Raffles

Selling raffle tickets can pull in a good bit o’ money. I reccomend either a 50/50 cash raffle or going to Best Buy on 23rd & 6th Ave and buying Wii for $280 (they often have a wii hidden in the back). Go to Party City buy a roll of raffle tickets and sell tickets at $5. Make sure to let everyone know when the drawing will be and if possible get them to write down a phone number or email so you can easily contact the winner. My experience is that a Nintendo Wii makes people go crazy. If you ask your friends, coworkers, even bartenders they all seem eager to pay $5 for a chance to win a Wii. Getting 30 people to each buy $20 of Wii raffle tickets will raise $600 ($320 after Wii cost). If you get 50 people to each buy $20 you will raise $1000.

#3 - Betting - Race Time

You will be running several races as part of your training. Before each race go around and ask your friendly degenerate gamblers if they would like to bet on your race time. You probably will know a 30 minute window in which you will finish. Let them bet on which minute you will finish for a $1 or if you have rich friends $5 per 15 second window. The winner gets half the money, the charity gets the other half. You can do this for each of your races.

#4 - Betting - Poker

Alot of people like poker. Very few people like dealing the cards for poker. Invite your friends over for a poker party and volunteer to be the poker dealer for the entire night. Ask them to each donate $20 in exchange for you dealing the cards. It is best to keep these poker parties to 10 or less. You can turn this into a monthly event and each month raise $200 for charity.

#5 - Wine Tasting Party

Head over to Trader Joe’s or any other good wine shop and buy 4 or 5 different wines of the same type (for example 5 merlot or 5 chardonnay etc.). Each bottle should cost between $5 and $20. When you get home wrap them each up in brown paper so no one can see the labels. Then print up a “wine tasting sheet” so each of your guests can rate each bottle and write a few notes. At the end of the night add up the votes and see which wine was preferred. It is always entertaining to see what people enjoy the most when they don’t have a bottle to look at. It is fun, entertaining and let’s not forget to charge each guest $20 for their night of wine tasting.

#6 - Leverage Matching Gifts Program (ok maybe even take advantage)

After you have raised money from raffles, open bars or whatever else it is ideal if your company has a matching gift program. This will instantly double your money. If you don’t have a matching program or you work for yourself, ask your trustworthy friends if they have one. If they do, you might be able to give them the cash and then have them go through their company’s matching program to double your money.

#7 - BE LOUD

Don’t be quiet about raising money for helping charity. Let everyone know. Keep telling them every chance you get. Send out broadcast emails. Add it to your email signature. Matter of fact, feel free to blackmail your friends. Demand $20/month or they will get emailed your training updates along with pictures of the blisters on your feet. Make sure these are good friends who can take a joke, otherwise expect to lose alot of friends. Add it to facebook, myspace, twitter and every where else people are following you. If you have casual Fridays wear your training jersey to work (assuming you have very casual Fridays). Keep your charity fundraising in front of everyone you know. You’ll have more luck asking for $5 from coworkers every paycheck then asking for $100 at once.

More un-politically correct and probably illegal fundraising methods to come…

My friend Tim Key runs a modular homes website and every now and then asks me for advice. I always enjoy helping him because it is very interesting to see what goes on in the smaller less spammed industries. What I have more commonly found is “innocent search engine spam”.

By this I mean it is only natural that people will want their sites in Google and will try their best to achieve it. Unless you regularly spend alot of time dealing with Google it is not simple or easy to know what to do and more importantly what to avoid. Here are some examples of “innocent search engine spam” that I have found in the modular home industry.
Sins of the father don’t clean themselves up

I came across a modular architect’s website. This modular architect is award-winning and commonly referenced by the press and good quality inbound links. You would expect to see his site do well. It doesn’t because the company that built his site in 2003 used hidden keyword stuffing (white font on white background). How do I know this because when I noticed the hidden text I checked out the html code and there was an actual comment in the code explaining everything. Clearly by the html comments they thought they were doing what Google wanted. The site is managed by a different web firm but the offending invisible text has not been removed.
Pretty Modular Homes Stink

Experienced internet marketers know where this is going - search engines are robots that can only read and can not read pretty images or video. No matter how pretty the site is, if you only have images, video or flash animation the search engines will not show you alot of search love. I have lost count how many sites have pages of quality text hidden from the search engines because it is in flash or images.

Even “Expert” Marketers Make Mistakes

Some of the modular housing sites are doing a great job. You can tell they have put alot of work into building good content with nice usability. But even these “expertly” optimized modular home websites have issues. The most common I notice is the improper use of 301 and 302 redirects. The worst use I have ever come across was a 301 into 302 into 302 into 302 into 302 into a 301 redirect. I would be shocked if the search engines had no issue with that setup. If you think you are an expert make sure to audit your work. It is easy to build up excessive layers over the years for your website. If you audit your website yearly you should be able to identify innocent mistakes that are easy for you to fix.

I am a strong believer in supporting local businesses and helping out your hometown, but I am a little torn right now.  Ya see there is a local florist from my hometown that is sorely in need of internet help.  Many of you already know I do a lot of pro bono internet help but this local florist hasn’t always provided me with 100% satisfaction (not even close).

For the sake of karma and also to provide another case study for people looking to promote a local business WITH SUBSTANTIAL MAIL ORDER POTENTIAL I’m gonna forget the unpleasant history and offer some free help.  Please do not to apply these suggestions to a local pizza shop website.  They won’t truly profit from it.  These suggestions are for businesses that deliver locally for orders taken from a very large area (ie florist shop).

1. Domain Name - Always make your website a .com.  Most people will assume your domain is a .com and type in .com thus resulting in you losing traffic.
2. Make your company name prominent.  It should be the first thing I notice.  Do not think that including a small thumbnail picture of your storefront can replace the need of having your name in easy to see BIG LETTERS.
3. Include substantial text on every page.  Pictures are nice but search engines cant see pictures.  If you have a pretty logo and it contains your street address and phone number, search engines will think you do not have a street address or phone number.  Make sure there are at least 4 paragraphs of text.  If you are wondering if you have enough text on your pages YOU DON’T.
4. Build multiple pages.  No one likes to work but if you want users and search engines to like your site you need to make it valuable.  A lot of pages of good content does just that.  Add testimonials, add a page for each of your top 20 products and write a lengthy description along with situations that the product would be appropriate for, create how-to pages, add pages that show off your portfolio.
5. Don’t stuff your footer with keywords.  It reduces the trust users have for your site and it doesn’t really help with the search engines.  This was a trick that stopped working over 5 years ago.  If you think a keyword is valuable enough to stuff in your footer than it is valuable enough to create a real page for.
6. Make sure each page has a unique and descriptive title tag, meta description tag and text headline.  The title tag and meta description is what shows up in Google’s search results and the text headline will help your visitors know what the page is about.
7. Make sure your website uses pretty filenames.  This is about to get technical but just bear with me.  Some website content management systems (thats the computer program that organizes your website content) use dynamic urls (this means you see “?” and other ugly things in your filenames.  Search engines have a hard time with this and it is also not winning any points with your visitors.  Ask your webmaster to use Mod-Rewrite to transform the urls into keyword rich urls.  Which would you prefer www.example.com/category?id=86 or www.example.com/prettyflowers/
8. Create a simple navigation that is easy for users to understand.  Do not include 100 links on every page.  Break your site up into a few main categories and provide unique subnavigation for each category.  For example your top navigation bar could have 6 links for each of your main categories.  Each of those 6 categories would have a unique subnavigation bar that has 10 links.
9. Now that you have a decent site or at least one that will meet minimum standards, it is time to promote it.  To promote a site you will need to get other websites to link to it.  This is one of the hardest things to do in internet marketing.  If you built a good looking site with a big amount of relevant and useful content than you should have something people will be willing to link to.  If you have a small site with no value then it will be near impossible to get people to link to you.  Here are some suggestions to gain inbound links aka other websites pointing to you.
• Submit your site to the top directories (Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW) and avoid the smaller directories.  Some of the smaller directories are scams and most are just not worth it.
• Ask businesses you deal with to exchange links with you.  If you are a florist it would be helpful to interlink your site with catering halls, photographers, limos, funeral homes etc.
• Contact local bloggers and see if you can do a guest post on their website.  In exchange for offering free information you can include a link to your site.  The readers of that blog will be in a win-win situation.
• Support local organizations.  Everyone loves charity and while helping them ask if they would be nice enough to recognize your charity by posting a link on their site.
• Contact your counterparts across America.  If you are a local florist contact other local florists and start a helpful referral directory on your site.  This will help your local customers who are looking to send flowers to relatives in other parts of the country and it will also help promote all the participating local florists.  Just make sure that you do not create duplicate content that is repeated on many websites - use unique descriptions.
10. Pay Per Click (PPC) - You can also promote your business by buying traffic.  If you spend money with PPC make sure you are analyzing the results.

• How much money was spent? Don’t keep spending just because that is what you did before.  Make smart decisions.
• What time or day brings the best results?  You can control the time and day your ad appears.  Maybe it is best to turn off your ad during the nighttime because it is only clicked on by people in other timezones.
• What keywords were used? Avoid using generic terms.  There are many people competing for “flowers” and thus the price is high.  There are alot fewer people competing for “flowers 90210″ thus the price will be lower.
• What negative keywords and filters are in place?  This will help to prevent your ad from being shown to people that are unlikely to buy.  Using the flower example you might want to include the negative keyword “paintings” to avoid your ad being shown to people searching for flower paintings.
• How many sales were generated?  It is great for the ego to know you have a thousand visitors/day but if they don’t buy anything it is a quick way to go out of business.  Track where the traffic comes from, what pages they visit and if they buy anything.  Google Analytics is a good & simple way to do this.

That should help any local florist and similar businesses get off the ground and enjoy the internet.

I just got back from San Francisco where I was supporting my wife and her fellow Team in Training members who were running a marathon on the hills of San Francisco.  I am a big advocate of exposing yourself to new things (who else will we learn).  Here are some things I learned from this marathon.
Small Groups of Ordinary People Can Make a Big Difference

The New York City chapter of Team in Training sent about 200 ordinary people to run the San Francisco marathon to raise almost $1 million dollars to fight cancer.  These people are like you and me.  They didn’t start as athletes but after five months of dedication and training classes they were able to run a marathon and get their shocked friends to donate almost $1 million dollars.

Long Distance Runners Do Shots of Salt Instead of Tequila

Heavy drinkers pay attention.  The next time you go to a pub to watch your favorite game and dont want to miss any action do what marathon runners do.  Take a packet of salt and eat it.  For marathon runners it is essential because they dont want to dehydrate  and the salt will help retain water.  If you want to avoid having to get off your ass to visit the little boys room do a salt shot.
One Person Can Make a Difference 

The NYC chapter sent 6 coaches to accompany the runners along the course.  These coaches are freaks of nature.  They look normal but have crazy endurance levels.  As the coaches ran the 26.2 mile course they would run along side a runner to make sure they were ok and encourage them for, then they would run back and find another runner to do the same thing.  ***Remember there were about 200 runners.***  Conservatively each coach probably ran over 100 miles.
Watching a Marathon is Exhausting

It’s hard to get any sympathy from my wife who ran 26.2 miles on the lovely hills of San Francisco but I was exhausted after running from location to location to cheer her on.  I probably ran 6 miles myself.  If you plan to cheer for someone at a marathon accept the fact you are only going to see them once or like me you will be running your own race course while doing math in your head to figure out if you can run a 1 mile shortcut before the runners cover 3 miles of the official course so you can arrive in time to see your special someone again.
Charity Causes Are a Great Way to Meet Women

Maybe this might not be always the case but Team in Training has alot of women (my guess is 75%).  The marathon I was at was crazier than that.  It was targeted to women and only about 3% of runners were men.  This is a great way to find a woman that is in shape.  Also they do long training runs on Saturdays which means you can sleep in and watch college football during Saturdays while your lady is busy training and not around yelling at you to do work around the house.
Running Supplies Have Crazy Profit Margins 

Besides helping charity, getting your body in shape and seeing ordinary people achieve extraordinary goals you can also learn how to make money from marathons.  The runners consume a lot of stuff like expensive sport drinks, bottles to hold the sport drinks, belts to hold those bottles etc.  This looks like a good industry to build a few niche sites for.

We are very happy continue the tradition of the Internet Marketers Charity Party.  Internet Marketers of NY is inviting, begging, pleading and in some cases even blackmailing people to attend our 3 hour open bar charity party on Monday October 15th in New York.  All the money raised goes to help fight cancer because Best of the Web is covering the expenses.

• Details
• 7pm-10pm October 15th
• Town Tavern, Manhattan, NY
• $40 donation to charity
• http://www.im-ny.org/events.html

This was a good cause for the charity party but now after reading Marty’s survivor blog post I am even more excited to be involved with this.   You can be involved too.  Just attend this charity party for a $40 donation.  But what if you can’t make it to Manhattan?  Don’t worry you can help us by donating money or something to raffle. But what if you are new to Internet marketing and don’t have any spare money or swag?  You can still help by spreading the word of this charity party by joining Marty’s meme.

Thank you to everyone who is helping this great cause.  And special thanks to these three people who I am tagging to continue Marty’s meme: Blackberry Whore, Potato Whore and Canuck Pride Whore

It is no secret that links are critical to search engine rankings.  If you have ever tried to develop links for a website you also know it is very hard.  Currently paid links provide the best ROI because you pay once and receive online advertising and a boost in the search engines.  Your marketing dollars are doing a great 2 for 1 job.

What if some search engine that controls over 50% of the market share (not going to name names) says you can no longer buy text advertisements because their algorithm has a weakness and they do not want to fix it.  They want you to change how you spend your marketing dollars.  Since they control over 50% of the market share you are going to be forced to change.  What is the next best ROI after paid links?

Based on my experience social marketing is the next best strategy.  Social marketing is not cheap and has a high amount of flops but the success of the few outweigh the losses of the many.  If you are not familiar with social marketing, it is when you make your idea so interesting the public will spread the word for you.  A good example of this is the “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube.  Those videos are so interesting millions of people have watched them and many have even linked back to the site.
By making your idea interesting the people will temporarily surge traffic to your site and in the long term they will link to your site.  If 5000 people are exposed to your interesting idea in a day and 1% link back to you from their blogs you just gained 50 links.  In case you are wondering these are the types of links that money can’t buy.

How do you do social marketing?  There are countless ways to do it wrong.  If everything is not perfect than it will never catch on.  Even the experts of social marketing have a hard time predicting what will be interesting to the public.  If you are doing this yourself expect a failure rate of over 90%.  If you want to hire someone to do it for you, you better grab them now.  The good social marketers have at least a 1 month backlog and some have up to 3 months.

Currently the NYC Department of Education website (http://schools.nyc.gov) is preventing Yahoo and MSN search engines from including its webpages in their search indices. If any parent tries to use Yahoo.com or MSN.com to search for information found on http://schools.nyc.gov, Yahoo and MSN will not be allowed to find it for the parent. The parent will be forced to use Google.com which is the only major search engine allowed to index content on http://schools.nyc.gov.

The technical reason why Yahoo and MSN is not allowed on the NYC DOE website is that there is a robots.txt file which is disallowing Yahoo’s Slurp bot and MSN’s msnbot but allowing Google’s googlebot. Combined Yahoo and MSN represent approximately 30% of all internet searchers. I think it is not a good thing that the New York City Department of Education website is blocking 30% of internet searchers from finding information.

It is very simple to allow Yahoo and MSN include the pages from NYC DOE website. The robots.txt file which is located at (http://schools.nyc.gov/robots.txt) simply needs the four lines that reference Slurp and msnbot to be deleted. Thank you for your time and I look forward to having this website available to all internet searchers.

Postnote : I no longer offer consulting but I will be happy to write the new robots.txt file and upload it for free. If you are worried about bandwidth costs I will also be happy to help with hosting. I’d be happy to help make this website a better resource for all.

The fine folks at Yahoo! did another good deed last week. They hosted one of the crazier power lunches I have ever attended in order to help some deserving small businesses.

Now I’ve been very lucky in my life. I did not attend an ivy league school, I’m not a billionaire and I don’t look like a model. But I have attended some pretty great lunches including the Diplomats Ballroom in the United Nations, a private chef’s tasting lunch in Napa Valley and a special event in the CN Tower. Yahoo’s power lunch is in a category by itself.

I was able to talk with Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo’s Small Business Guru Rich Riley (who also created a successful million dollar startup) and oh yea I was suspended high up in the air overlooking the Manhattan skyline. This was truly a power lunch like no other.
What made this power lunch really great was that I was also joined by three really happy small business owners. Ya see Yahoo ran a small business contest and these three had won this lunch as well as a $25,000 Yahoo! advertising budget and a mentor to help them spend that free advertising the best way.

In addition to the great karma from this contest, it turns out Yahoo! has been quietly doing things to help small business. During the power lunch I found out they were in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina helping people get back on their feet and getting their online presence rolling again. A big tip of the hat to Yahoo! and a congratulations to the winners who won out of 10,000 entries.

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