The rat race. The definition by Robert Kiyosaki is basically a rat wheel that you constantly run on split up in pie slices. Each slice can be a paycheck, a liability, or an opportunity.

Getting out of the rat race means that your passive income exceeds your monthly expenses. Passive income is money that you make on your own rather than get by working for someone else. You can obtain passive income by buying and selling stocks, investing in real estate, and starting a business.

The key to your businesses success is to lower the expenses and bring in the profits. In order to do that you have to learn how to use leverage. For example if you bought a $150,000 2-unit property you would not pay $150,000 in cash. You would offer the least amount of out of pocket cash and get the seller to finance the balance, or take out a loan. In business, you would seek out strategic partnerships with other companies that help your company grow and run more efficiently.

Strategic partnerships would be maybe a call center that handles pay per performance cold calling. They would work hard to make a sale so that they make a profit. Such a partner would cost you zero risk because in order for you to pay them any money you would be getting money from the new sale to cover that payment.

Whn your company is just starting out or suffering from a bad economy your marketing budget may be very small. Don’t worry. You can still get alot of marketing for just $400 per month!

Some internet marketing companies turn away clients with budgets under $5,000 per month or so. Web Design Taxi has marketing plans starting at $400 and going up depending on what your marketing campaign requires. With the minimum investment you can get the basics of onsite search engine optimization, search engine and directory submissions, and monthly ranking reports. Increase the budget a little and get additional link building and social network marketing services.

Marketing is what gets you traffic and/or sales. But an important part of your marketing is going to be conversions. And you do not get conversions with low quality websites. So make sure your website is web 2.0 friendly first. If not then request a free quote for website redesign.

In case you have not noticed, we removed our adsense ads from our blog. With it went the revenue sharing. Fortunately this will not affect anyone because so far there has been nobody interested in co-authoring posts. We may turn it back on in the future if we get contributors. Especially for tutorial authors who write unique content for us.

Potential seo clients always have the wrong idea about optimization. Some of them think that seo is a one time thing that if done properly will bring them thousands of dollars in sales. Others think that the top 10 rankings will come in a week. Most of an seo company sales process includes deprogramming the client to understand the specifics of how it all works.

A proper seo/sem campaign should be done for long-term link traffic. Whether the traffic comes from a signature link on a forum post or a top spot for a prime search term in google, it is the long-term that really matters. You may get a ranking in the #1 spot for your main keyword then the next day that same search finds you missing from the top 100 results.

Your campaign should always include directory submissions, search engine submissions (smaller ones), targeted forum and blog posting and commenting, etc.

You have probably visited many seo and design forums where “experts” in seo claim that PageRank is not important anymore. The problem with that is that it is false. The higher the PageRank you will notice a higher amount of traffic to your website. Our website right now is a PR2 and gets a LOT of traffic. Now imagine if we had a PR8…

The best way of gaining that PR is actually a mix of methods. One of them includes building one-way links from directories. Directories do help you regardless what anyone says. Obviously you will benefit from direct traffic that comes from those directories, but you also get credit for the link. Get about 20 of those links and BAM you have a PageRank of 2 on a new website.

Then put out articles with a link credit on them and publish them on free websites. Webmasters use your articles and are required to link back.

If you are a web design or seo company you have the right to place a link credit on the client’s website footer which helps build your PR. But you can also release free templates and themes requiring a link back and call it a Creative Commons License. This will generate lots of links to you quickly because there is a large number of people who download free templates. It is easy to publish them because there are websites dedicated to publishing them.

You can put out monthly press releases with link credits which is good because they are provided as RSS Feeds. Websites out there are automated to republish rss feeds, and in turn your link gets placed with your press item. You may also get traffic from the release by someone searching the release website or googling specific keywords that brought your release to the top 10 results.

In addition, you can use Digg, Twitter, and other social networks to generate inbound links & massive amounts of traffic.

You can search for blogs that do not have the nofollow attribute on them and comment on them. Make sure you comment appropriately and not just to get a link. If you respect other webmasters they will respect you. And you can ensure your comment will not be marked as spam. Do not post a link directly in your comment though unless it is relevant as a resource for the posts question or another comments question. You can post your link in the space provided which many blogs allow. You would also benefit from traffic on blogs that do use the nofollow attribute because you posted a quality comment and the person reading it wants to know more about you.

Have you seen this message before? I have a few myspace pages myself. Because I am a recording artist and producer, I have a myspace band page. But when I am trying to network and add people in the music business I come across alot of “does not accept add requests from bands”.

That message is a big problem. I am unsure of why people would restrict add requests from bands. If you keep in mind that alot of those “bands” are single artists like myself. I am a consumer. So what if you let those thousands of bands add you so you can market to them? Denying such a request is a marketing no-no. It is bad for sales. It is bad for traffic. It is bad for your reputation.

Bands are not always trying to leverage your connections into a record deal. They may simply want to keep updated on your work. And if they are not your friend on myspace then they cannot get your bulletins about new albums, tour dates, and invites to concerts. It is plain stupid to restrict consumers from your product.

Holidays are more than a time for families to get together and eat a feast. Holidays are great for marketing to consumers. You will notice many online shopping websites transform their design based on the holiday such as red and green with ornaments for Christmas, and pumpkins with orange and black for Halloween.

Along with theme changes companies always have a special offer ready for visitors. Web Design Taxi is no different. This Halloween season we are offering search engine marketing starting at just $150 per month ($300 regular price). This offer is good from today until Halloween.

Clearly this type of marketing has been around for a long time. Have you ever notices that on the top of Yahoo you notice their logo change during holidays and special days of the year? What about the time Google went all dark for a day that was meant to conserve energy? Everyone is into utilizing holidays for traffic generation and hype.

If your company has a website, it most likely needs traffic. Unless of course you are the ceo of a major corporation with lots of brand recognition. If you are then you are most likely not going to care about this post unless you are optimizing your traffic.

Free services and tools are a great way of generating traffic. Let’s say for example that you have an interior design company. Offering your visitors a free flash tool online that allows them to decorate their room virtually before they buy or sign up for your service will help you make the sale.

The extra money spent on free tools that require zero or little management from you can help you generate twice as many sales or more!

Traffic generation is more than social networking and blogging. By offering a free tool you are bound to get a flood of inbound links from grateful webmasters who stumbled upon your website. And if you are wise, you will have a graphic and a statement requesting that visitors link to your tool on your website using a code that you provide.