by Kevin Fleming on November 2, 2009
Today Ford reported a nearly 1 billion dollar profit for the third quarter of 2009, something that I’ve seen coming for months mainly because they were the only company out of the big three that refused to take the poisonous TARP money. Without getting too political I think the whole “it’s too big to fail classification” is a joke in a free market economy. Ironically many of the large companies we have today were started in a recession, because failing companies during a recession pave the way for innovation.
Not only did Ford not take government money, they have a phenomenal product line up, and great marketing, something that the other two “American” car companies lack. You can really tell that Ford genuinely believes in the products they make, and their website clearly demonstrates that. Ford’s website delivers a clear message – American cars are back, more fun and more fuel efficient than ever. The site has big, bold and exciting images of their product line up, and plays on simplicity, as seen below:
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by Kevin Fleming on September 25, 2009
One of the first, and most important things I figured out when I started blogging full time is that hiring a team to write for you can be much more profitable than doing all of the writing yourself. Two or three writers can manage to crank out way more content than I could flying solo. The best part is that the writers begin to pay for themselves very quickly, here’s why:
- Having multiple writers allows me to increase the content of my sites at 2 – 5x the rate that I could when writing articles myself (depending on how many writers I hire). More content and more frequent updates equals more traffic which leads to more revenue.
- I now have more time to spend on marketing and promotion. Many successful bloggers will tell you that when first starting a new site, 70% or more of your time should be spent on marketing and promotion.
Many people decide not to hire writers because they worry about the quality of the writing. My philosophy has always been that if I can do it myself, I can probably hire someone to do it better than I can, for less than the cost of my time. The trick is to give the people that work for you all of your expectations up front, and not to settle with anything less than what you outlined initially. If the writer ends up writing on the wrong topic, make them rewrite it. If the article isn’t formatted correctly, make them reformat it etc.. There are always going to be bad hires out there but most people do just fine with clear instructions.
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