Ever wonder how a credit card number is verified? A fascinating article, Making Sense of your Credit Card Number published by Digital Inspiration Technology Blog.

You credit card number may look like a random string of 16 digits that’s unique in the world but those digits reveal a little more than you think. For instance, the first digit of the card represents the category of industry which issued your credit card.

American Express is in the travel category and cards issued by them have 3 as the first digit. If you have VISA or MasterCard, your card’s first digit should be either 4 or 5 as they are from the banking and financial industry.

The first six digits of your credit card number identify the institution that issued the card to you. VISA cards follow the series 4xx while MasterCard uses 51-55 as the prefix.

You may even verify if a given credit card number is valid or not using simple addition. The following visual illustration courtesy of Mint.com will help you understand more about the anatomy of your credit card.

As we know, seniors are adopting the “Interweb” like never before, so if you’re sending texts to them as part of a multi media campaign, you should use the most recent codes, sent to me courtesy of Andrew Powell of Montreal, Canada.

ATD – at the doctors.

BFF – best friend fell.

BTW – bring the wheelchair.

BYOT – bring your own teeth.

FWIW – forgot where I was.

GGPBL – gotta go, pacemaker battery low.

GHA – got heartburn again.

IMHO – is my hearing aid on?

LMDO - laughing my dentures out.

OMMR – on my massage recliner.

OMSG – oh my! sorry, gas.

ROFLACGU – rolling on floor laughing and can’t get up.

TTYL – talk to you loud.

I’ve already blogged about Linked In Polls,but since it’s quick, easy and free – it’s worth reminding you to consider polling your clients and asking them questions that your other clients might be interested in. This poll for example is interesting because I am not a user of Google Chrome and didn’t think that many people were using it. Of course this is a VERY small sample, but still surprising. What I really like about the Linked In Polls is their outstanding graphics… Don’t you agree?

Whitelisting your email is something that many Internet beginners still struggle with. With the proliferation of spam and junk emails, it’s still something that’s important to do.

Having people whitelist your email will improve your email delivery and conversion rates.

That’s why this explanation really stood out as a great value-creation tool for clients. I thought would share it with you.

You’re welcome!

The Grand Rapids LipDub Video (below) was filmed May 22nd, with 5,000 people and involved a major shutdown of downtown Grand Rapids, which was filled with marching bands, parades, weddings, motorcades, bridges on fire, and helicopter take offs. It is the largest and longest LipDub video, to date.

This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a “dying city.” They of course disagreed strongly and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy they feel is growing exponentially, in this great city.

Rob Bliss, Director & Executive Producer explains that they chose Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a song about death but was in the end, triumphant and filled to the brim with life and hope.”

This $40,000 production was entirely financed by the generosity of local sponsors that are listed below.

This is yet another example of Exponential Mindset Thinking™ in action, leveraging the power and persuasive influence of the Internet. Enjoy this WORLD RECORD SETTING* video!

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I have many clients who ask me how to communicate with kinesthetic people over the Internet. This video, even though a visual cue, puts you right back into the movie which is critical for a touchy feely kinesthetic person. So there you have it, a quick, simple solution. Integrate videos to tap into the SENSORY experience!

This tip is one of many I share with clients as part of my Killer Kopywriting System™. If you’d like to learn more, click on the hyperlink and imagine how much more traffic you’d get to your website or blog and how much better your conversions would be if you knew how to have Killer Konversations™!

A lot of people debate the pros and cons of Social Media, what I have come to call Social NOTworking – where people waste countless hours exchanging posts, chats, pokes, photos and other electronic elements with people they wouldn’t be caught dead with face-to-face. But that’s my personal bias AND I am not saying that Social Media is not worth doing – it is, but not for the reasons MOST people think…

That’s a discussion for another day and one I reserve for my paying clients to help them out-perform their peers by doing out-of-the-ordinary things that create extra-ordinary results.

Results that baffle their competitors – BECAUSE they (the competitors) have no clue…. Shhh! It’s called Stealth Marketing and means they can’t copy what you’re doing!

In support of my bias, I came across recent reports that continue to show that website traffic from social media networks is still pretty low.

SeeWhy studied 60,000 ecommerce transactions across a variety of sites in February 2011. Since running an online store is about selling things, they looked at only the people who actually loaded items into their shopping cart. Here’s one of the summary results:

Email Marketing Generates More Buyer Traffic Than Social Media

Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media

As you can see, email brought in the most traffic, with direct and search significantly less. Social media came in at only 4.3%, not great, but better than display advertising, so that’s something to think about.

Next they took that info and charted the percentage of people from each source who completed their transaction. In other words, the people who handed over their credit card number and hit submit.

Email Marketing Converts To More Sales Than Social Media

If you want more sales, send more emails!

In the above pie chart you can clearly see that email and direct hits to the site still resulted in the best sales conversions, social media picked up a dismal 2.11% of the overall, but look at display advertising. Yikes, only 0.53% conversion rate? Maybe you should be spending money on your Facebook page rather than on display ads, but once again that’s a discussion for another day. Social NOTworking does have its place, but not where or how you might think. We explain this in our Killer Konversations™ Workshops if you’re interested…

At the end of all of this, SeeWhy does put in the usual disclaimer. Your mileage may vary and different types of ecommerce sites will have different results. While I understand that this is a study of ONLY 60,000 transactions, it supports my bias that email marketing still is the primary source for online sales.

There’s a fundamental reason – it’s a privileged conversation that people still value – as long as it’s not violated.

If you’re asking yourself why email marketing isn’t in the news more often, it’s because it simply isn’t as new and trendy as social media marketing.

The news “media” are always searching for new trends and buzzwords to fill their empty pages.

My clients don’t care about the buzz and hype – all they want is more people buying their products and services.

If that’s what you want – send them more emails – but not just any emails… That’s considered spam. You need to know what to send to whom.

That’s what we teach our clients to do – become a client today. Contact us now and we’ll help you avoid making mistakes that cost money and lost sales.

Google Instant is not new, but it is having a dramatic influence on how people search….

As you can see when you use Google, the search results change dynamically AS YOU TYPE. The suggestions DO influence what people will type in – this is having a dramatic effect on Google Adwords…

Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours sent this Google Warning article link to me several months ago. I shared this with my clients giving them hints and suggestions, but those are beyond the scope of a blog post.

If you’d like ‘instant’ access to tip and tricks to make sure you avoid mistakes and are kept informed in ‘real time’ – contact us to join one of our many programs.

Every once in a while I come across something that stands out. Today’s post is an example of a subtle question (13b) that puts the previous question into context. It’s the BEST SURVEY QUESTION I have read in several years. Leave it to Apple to do it – they know the value of feedback. They also understand and respect the CONTEXT and INTENT in which it’s given.

From Apple

When I meet with my clients, I go into substantially more detail than just highlighting something like this. There are two psychological constructs in play here that were outlined in substantial detail in two recent books I read. Books you would not come across in your airport or local bookstore.

This is what I do as The Exponential Growth Strategist – I seek out distinctions, nuances and explanations so my clients can tailor outstanding examples like this one in their businesses and/or careers. If you’d like to be coached or mentored and access this level of expertise, contact me. If you qualify, we’d love to have you in our RESULTS GUARANTEED Platinum Program.

Recently, I was reviewing infomercials (they are a great source of creative ideas). A popular TV pitchman had the audience repeating the mantra, “just set it and forget it!”

Set And Forget Might Work For BBQ Chicken, But Not Your Website

While this might be an exciting idea for a dinner appliance, it’s suicide for your website. Like a car or a house, your website requires regular, on-going maintenance.

What is “Website Maintenance”?

I define website maintenance as both the art and science of keeping a website current in both technology and (Killer Kopy™) content. That means assuring proper functionality (how users move around the pages), verifying the accuracy of copy, fixing any broken links and images as well as performing an overall brand/positioning assessment of the site to make sure it reflects how you and /or your company wants to be perceived online.

An easy metaphor to explain website maintenance is home maintenance.

You can take a look at your home for light bulbs that need to be replaced, look to see if there are any new cracks in the foundation, maybe a room needs some new paint, tiles or carpet.

The same is true of your website. It’s good practice to review your site at least once a month.

Website review tips:

• Check date sensitive content such as an announcement of an upcoming event. After the date passes, it should no longer be “upcoming” and the date or deadline changed. The longer the old date remains, the more out-of-date your website appears to your visitors.
• Even though computers “don’t make mistakes”, functional elements of your website including contact us forms, event registrations, product purchase links and other e-commerce and database functionality should be checked. Often, these break due to an indirect parameter being changed somewhere else on the site. You don’t need to check everything each month, just run a random spot check or pick a section of your site each month to review.
• Check external links (links to other sites) on your site. There are several free utilities that can provide this function for you. Recently, I had someone send me an email with a link in her signature that was broken…
• You should review as many pages on your site as you can, paying special attention to the links in the navigation bar(s), make sure the visual elements appear correctly on all pages. This can be done very quickly to find the most obvious errors.
• Check for images that are not displaying correctly or have the dreaded “red x”. This can usually be done by skimming the pages quickly – you may realise that some images load too slowly (all you need to do is reduce the file’s resolution to a web optimised format.)

I highly recommend taking notes as you do your website review. You’ll get ideas for immediate and future improvement that can become part of your tactical and strategic deployment respectively.

What do you do when you find an issue?

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If you have the need to translate text or documents, Google has a great translation tool. This is handy when you do a lot of blogging or have a lot of YouTube videos and someone posts a comment in a foreign language… It still has difficulty with vernacular, but it’s always improving!

Google has made recent changes that significantly affect your SEO effectiveness. One of them I discussed recently, called Google Previews. Today’s post is regarding Google Places – another attempt by Google to fend off Facebook’s domination by forcing you to put additional information into Google to increase Google’s ranking – not necessarily improve your own SEO results. In fact this complicates the process in a zero sum game. More work, effort and cost for the same or WORST outcome than you previously had.

Contrary to what they want you to believe, Google is in business for themselves and Google Places I am sure you’ll agree is yet another task that you have to undertake to not lose whatever presence you previously had.

As a blog reader and subscriber, I want you to know about these shifts. If you want to know what to do about them, you’ll need to become a client. We have a wide variety of Internet programs and products to choose from. Contact us and we’ll discuss the various available options.

I don’t want to leave you completely in the dark so here is a link that explains the potential negative impact of Google Places. Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours originally sent it to me.

(Psst! Thanks Ray!)

Earlier this week, I blogged about how Vaseline and radioactivity are related to make a point – well actually, to illustrate how William Tucker has been able to reduce the fear mongering propaganda of the mass media to simple, easy-to-understand metaphors and analogies that any 5th grader can understand.

Mt Tucker recently added another article to his on-going explanation regarding Infant formula made from Tokyo tap water.

His brilliance is simplifying the otherwise complex into something easy for the layperson to grasp.

One of the key strategies that I will be teaching our elite VIP and Platinum Members this weekend is how to do this systematically.

How to leverage tools like the one below that Mr Tucker shared with us in one of his recent articles.

Every business has hidden assets like this – the key is to know how to use them effectively within an automated approach.

We’ll miss you this weekend.

Japanese Earthquake - Radiation Dose Chart

Psst! If you’d like to give your business results a non-radioactive boost, contact us to discuss our business coaching options and we’ll have a chat about how we can GUARANTEE RESULTS in writing…

I am sure you’ve come across Google Previews (as shown below), but what’s important about it is it’s going to change the SEO and web design concepts as it becomes more popular. Google’s done this to keep you on its page longer, in an attempt to regain it’s #1 status on the web, which it lost to Facebook in 2010. Facebook has more views and the visits are 10 times longer (22 minutes versus just over 2 minutes on Google per day).

I’ll talk about other strategies Google is using which are going to make your SEO strategies even harder and more cumbersome, but for today, I wanted to focus on Google Previews.

We’re all going to need to design our pages according to this new feature. Hopefully Google will explain how it selects the summary text, at this stage it all seems quite random even though it’s not. As soon as Google reveals anything worth reporting – I’ll let you know.

Google Preview Example

This second example of a Google Preview shows how complex this is because the preview is page-by-page depending on the listing, keyword search, etc…

Google Preview Example

In a previous post, I explained the benefit of using a great illustration or photo to explain a step-by-step process. Sometimes the image can be a page of text – like this one for mobile phone recycling… One page says it all in a very attractive layout, with the necessary links.

This is a great example of how to explain something, step-by-step. A picture is worth a thousand words. Always, always Keep It Simple Stupid (K.I.S.S.) especially when it comes to instructions and explanations.

Did you know you can fart proof your dog? If you’ve ever had a dog with flatulence, you know how valuable this can be.

The Internet Marketing Lesson is that I explained how to leverage this fact to two clients: One leveraged it and the other didn’t.

Which one do you think has doubled sales and tripled profits?

Enough said.

The point is that you have to capture people’s attention – especially on the Internet where people’s attention is measured in seconds.

The proof is in the pudding – I bet you you can’t bear NOT knowing how you can fart proof your dog – EVEN IF YOU DON’T HAVE A DOG!

This is how powerful Killer Kopywriting™ can be. The difference between struggling to get people to your website and having an avalanche of qualified prospects…

Let me state my bias right up front – I am not into texting or tweeting. I think Twitter is mostly a massive waste of time. Yes – I have a Twitter page and joined Twitter 2 years before it became mainstream.

However there are always exceptions to the rule, like this article in The Economist that explains how people Text for jobs – Very creative and entrepreneurial!

This was just too funny not to share with you. We’ve all had that annoying paper jam…

As you’ve come to expect from me and my blogs, I come at things from a different perspective and paradigm. My goal for my blogs is to be the catalyst for ideas that can help you grow your business. The Internet is an exponential tool that can help in countless ways. Today’s post is another example – using tools like Linked In Polls to gather valuable information.

It’s pretty self-explanatory and that’s OK.

Exponential Internet Marketing is not rocket science. It’s all about “doing stuff” that works and having the discipline to follow up and follow through.