From:
To:
Departing:
Returning:
Adults (18-64)

Thursday, December 27, 2007

MEDICAL CARE ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE!


As Featured On Ezine Articles

Look at what the Dutch are doing! DYI Blood work! Already widely accepted in Japan, now adapted in Holland.

No doctors, no nurses, no appointments, no travel, no doctor fees. You can do it anywhere, anytime by mail and results sent to you within 48 hrs to your e-mail!

Apply on the net for a kit to be sent to your home, do the blood gathering whenever you want, send your sample to the lab and get your results and recommendations deliverd to your in box!

Now that is what I call universal health care!


Wednesday, December 26, 2007

How do you achieve credibility for your internet business?

So you have paid your money to whomever it is that has told you that you can get rich sleeping if you market and sell their product or services. You have gotten yourself a website and an URL with an interesting sounding name that differentiates you from the tens of thousands that are also selling the product and services, you were provided with, had someone make you an impressive website or built it yourself with all kinds of interesting information about the products you are selling and an e-commerce page that allows people to buy your products on line!

Now what.

Nobody is visiting your website let alone buying your products. So you start working on promoting your website in an effort to generate traffic. You start placing free classified ads or even paid ads in various internet publications such as Bacpage.com, Craig’s lists, Add-post, Lycos .com, Local.com, Domesticsales.com, Google base and so forth and so on.

You go to your website stats every day and still there is barely a noticeable trickle of visitors to your site.

You have already printed business cards, postcards and brochures at considerable cost courtesy of Vistaprint.com and have distributed them in the small town that you live in and have gone around your neighborhood, the golf club, the beauty parlors and put postcards promoting your internet business in every mailbox that you could find. You have spent a ton of money on print cartridges and glossy paper for your brochures.

You keep checking your visitors stats and be damned if you could find any increase in traffic of visitors to your website not to mention anyone buying anything from you.

What to do next?

You scour the internet for advice, watch hundreds of video’s that are all bait and switch schemes that promise the world and deliver very little, you try some of those get rich quick marketing schemes that do not work, throw more money away, send e-mails with promotional materials, including video’s, to whomever you can find in your outlook address book.

Make a ton of videos that you then upload to YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Mydeo, My Space, WAYN, Face Book, because the entire community of Guru’s tell you that it will increase your rankings on the search engines. This is only partially true with regard to your rankings in the video search pages but does not really help you with your rankings on the regular search pages.

And still barely anything happens to your daily visitors statistics.
So there must be something else that is required.

And of you go setting up your own blogs on subjects related to your business, commenting on other peoples blogs that are relevant to the business. Writing articles on EzineArticles.com and more commenting on other articles relevant to you business.
You join Adsense, put a Google search bar and Adsense ads on your website go to Commission Junction and get RSS feeds to earn commissions on their ads; all this in the hope that the cross polinization will drive traffic to your site. You get an XML site map for your sites, upload them to your site, register them with Google and Yahoo and get verified.

Surely you have done a fair amount with all of the above to get your sites noticed. I have had various refereed articles published in my name, that people are using to promote their websites such as Amazon.com, Strategic Finance, All Business and so on, I am not sure if they are successful, but these entries have been there for four years, so that must mean something. All you have to do is Google or Yahoo search “bou van kuyk” (my name) and at least Five to ten entries show up promoting the big name companies mentioned above, including my own three websites, but then who will ever look for a name like that unless they already know me?

Yet traffic to my websites remains anemic and I wonder what it is that I have to do next! Or what it is that prevents people from taking me serious.

I am good looking, have an honest face, am responsible, get my customers great value products, got a privacy statement on my website, have a published Toll free number, various IM buttons by which they can contact me thru Yahoo or MSN with a simple click, am approved/certified by Pay pal, have opened business accounts for each of my businesses so as to not commingle funds, so what is stopping people from making purchases on my website?

Although this sounds like an excuse, and I certainly have not thrown in the towel yet, but some of the reasons may be readily available.

First, I believe that the internet is riddled with no name scammers, MLM’ers and people that imitate big name companies to extract money from honest unsuspecting people, selling them stuff that does not really exist, who have been burned so many times that they have become gun-shy and are reluctant to part with their money to anyone that cannot positively verify that they are part of a well known chain.

The worst of these products and services are subscription based and typically start with a free trial period. The subscription kicks in automatically after the trail period and is invariably under $30 ($29.99) per month and non refundable. The trick here then is to make the cancellation method as cumbersome as possible, hoping that the customer forgets or gives up on trying to cancel it before the trial is over. At least one monthly subscription kicks in for an amount that is low enough for the customer not to sue to get it refunded and to let it go or write it off as a lesson learned.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! This person will think twice before he or she enters into a transaction on the internet again and there are millions of them.

Secondly, the fact that any person who joins an MLM and is not one of the first to join, like number 98,996, will find it extremely difficult to make money without spending an inordinate a mount of time and money to get traction. So it is important to pick a business that does not depend on MLM to make money, unless you are one of the firsts to join.

Although I have been unsuccessful to date, I firmly believe that the YTB proposition of offering people and corporations their own website to book travel and receive commissions is a good one.

It is unfortunate that the MLM part is so widely publicized as the real money maker, which I believe it is not, except for the very few who came in at the top. It is merely a strategy to increase travel bookings under the YTB banner by the masses and so increase market share for YTB in sales of travel.

Most individuals that spend less than $6000 per year in travel should not own their own website, although of course any amount of travel that they book on their own website, no matter how small, counts toward sales of travel by YTB thus growing the company and increasing its market share.

The minimal amount of travel booked by these small owners, compared to the amount they spend for maintaining a YTB website has also skewed YTB’s earnings. YTB earns more from selling and hosting portals/websites than from selling Travel.

However the notion of taking out the middleman and offering the traveler the opportunity to be the travel agent instead is pure genius.

The traveler/corporation now has the opportunity to benefit from the commissions that the traditional middle man receives and lower their travel expenses with those commissions.

Additionally by becoming the middleman/travel agent, YTB offers its site owners the opportunity to be in charge of their travel arrangements. The site owner/traveler has full and direct access to the travel operators and as such has access to benefits that are not available to the ordinary traveler.

So I am convinced that I picked the right business model, but would like to only sell travel the “honorable way” by targeting people/corporations who can truly benefit/make a profit from having a turnkey secure hosted travel website and therefore by definition will buy at least $6000 per year in travel. I do this by openly publishing the one time set up costs of $450 and the monthly maintenance/hosting/ Liability insurance fee of $50 up front, which by the way may be the other reason why nobody comes to my site, perhaps I should hide the real costs just like everyone else!
That is the way to a win/win proposition, I make money from their travel, they save money on their travel and YTB increases market share in the travel business instead of the Website hosting business.

So I have not really been able to provide the answer to my original question. And I would be greatly appreciative for any helpful hints from fellow strugglers.

Having said all that, I invite anyone to comment on my observation of how to get noticed on the internet and to be taken seriously and my observations about YTB, MLM and Scammers.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

50 Million Americans 20-25% DO NOT have Health-Care

Watch the videos in the title and below.

And learn what can be done about this currently inhumane situation.

It should be made a simple tenet of Human rights that says that every human being should have the fundamental right to medical care regardless of his or her income.



When we tried in the afternoon of September 11 2001 to obtain some insulin from a pharmacy in Jersey City for two little old ladies who had just been evacuated from Battery Park, Manhattan that day and who had no clue where they were going to go next, we were told that they could not have any as they did not have their perscriptions filled at that Pharmacy and had no proof of insurance. THIS WAS ON THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEMBER 11 ACROSS THE HUDSON FROM THE PLACE WHERE TWO OF THE TALLEST TOWERS HAD JUST COLLAPSED BEFORE THE EYES OF EVERYONE!

Pretty sick if you ask me!



My girlfriend was asked in 2002 at a Jersey City hospital at 11:30 pm, where I was submitted for emergency care after a car accident, how much my annual income was!

Pretty sick if you ask me!

Here is the solution!




What do you think?

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Illegal Immigration

I watched some news item the other day about a sherrif in Arizona (view the video link in the blog title) who like the law enforcers in some other places like Irving and Farmers Branch Texas and some folks in Oklahoma have decided to arrest all illegal immigrants, jail them, make them wear pink underwear and send them home.

In the context of my blog title this is ironic for a free people to take such negative action, one and secondly use Hitler type razzia's to achieve their objectives.

These folks have short memories, Arizona was one of the frontier states in the Wild West era. Texas was Mexican territory not so many decades ago. Both have a history of conquering and settling on new Land.

They were not the indiginous population of these territories, in fact the Mexicans were in Texas before the "Americans" and before them it was the Indians who roamed most of these territories freely.

So only a few decades ago all the grand parents or great grandparents of the people who are now trying to run immigrants from their towns, put them in jail and make them wear pink underwear, moved into a territory that was not theirs and settled there freely without any visa, work permit or whatever.

I am not suggesting that we go back to the rough and tough settler days but let us at least remember and recognize the fact that at one point in our history our families were all immigrants. We made the rules of settling where ever we wanted and never asked permission from the Indians or indiginous population if it was legal or convenient for them. In fact most of the time territory was obtained with bloodshed.

The majority of the current illigal immigrants are not violent, they come here in search of employment in order to provide for and feed their often extended families over here or at home, just like the early settlers risked life and limb to find a place where they could provde for their own.

One characteristic that most immigrants have in common is that they are poor and barely have a pot to piss in, even our great grandparents were that way.

Now would it not be logical that people whose forefathers endured the same hardship as these modern immigrants would emphatise with kindred spirits rather than ruthlessly try to run them out of town deploying NAZI tactics.



We should be helping them on the road to legalization. Instead we harrass them, request unreasonable amounts of money to get them legalized, remember they do not have a pot to piss in! with a complicated immigration process that sometimes can only be safely navigated by expert lawyers, more money that they do not have, and that can sometimes last months if not years to complete!

Mission impossible and Catch 22 at the same time!

I remember a long time ago in the 70's the Swiss attempted the same thing with cheap Italian labour and they failed. They failed because the cheap Italian labour was doing all the work that the elitist Swiss refused to do. It got to the point where critical infrastructure projects ground to a halt because there were no more Italians to keep them going.

They gave in and eased the regulations for Italian guest workers, and the threat that politicians perceived for the Swiss labour force never materialised.

One must not forget that politicians need a platform to give them a reason to be, even though the ordinary people often do not appear to find these things an issue, it is one for the politician as he/she needs it to have a platform to speak from, like the seperatists in Canada.
Most ordinary citizens of Quebeck would laugh at you when Canadian seperatism came up, most were by-lingual, most wanted to keep the country together. A lot of Canadian Prime ministers were Quebeqois at the time.

But no the Canadian separtist movement was driven enthusiatically by the politcal elite in Quebec just so that they had a platform that could be carried by the media and keep them in the spotlight, even though the ordinary citizens could not care less.

Needless to say the issue died a natural death.

Given this perspective, I think the American people should stop being defensive about immigration, the country is founded by immigrants just like the ones that are now coming in, Times have changed and it is no longer about land but about jobs.



We need people that are willing to start at the bottom of the foodchain and slowly work their way up, just like our forefathers, without them there would be no one working the jobs that less and less Americans are willing to work and our infrastructure would go to hell.

We should make it easier and less costly for them to obtain the permissons they need to go about their business and become legal. Much of this will also take the criminal element out of the illegal immigrants work, get rid of the army of leeches of lawyers, who are earning a fortune ripping these poor folks off.

All these efforts to make the modern immigrants life a misery shows a lack of self confidence in those that pursue it. This is America of the free, the confident people who look to the future and should be willing to allow others to be able to look to the future in confidence and without fear.

Let me know what you all think