It’s no secret that the traditional print newspaper industry is losing money heavily all around the world. Costs are rising while circulation numbers are plummeting year upon year.

So it’s no surprise to hear the news that some of the world’s oldest newspapers such as the New York Times (US), the Times (UK) and the Sunday Times (UK) are to become the first general interest newspapers to charge for their online content.

Admittedly, the Wall Street Journal and the FT already charge for their premium online content, but these are topic specific titles that cater for a specific niche of reader.

So let’s examine why this approach is doomed to failure and the lessons that internet marketers can learn from it.

1) The Perceived Value Of General News Content

In general, the price you charge for anything sets the future expectation in the minds of the consumer. So if you give away content for free, the perceived value of it is set correspondingly low.

Once that initial perception is set, it’s extremely difficult to alter, especially when these expectations have been reinforced over time.

And as the major general interest newspapers have been providing free content since before the millennium, the entitlement mentality relating to general news content is now firmly entrenched in the minds of the public.

That perception won’t change just because the increasingly desperate newspaper companies start charging for access to the same type of content.

If the newspaper had first started charging for content in 1998 when they first started publishing information online, they might have had a fighting chance of making the paid business model work.

2) The Scope Of The Content

The scope of the content provided by general interest newspapers is too broad and at the same time too shallow.

Most newspaper provide a range of politics, financial news, fashion, celebrity and sport etc. But due to the all encompassing nature of their content, it must by definition cover the topics at a more superficial level.

And that’s a major weakness which these newspapers will struggle to overcome. Let’s face it, if you want detailed, in-depth coverage, commentary and stats on any of these topics, it’s possible to find a wide range of high-quality websites, blogs and video channels dedicated to each of these niche subjects.

Increasingly, these alternative sites provide content that is high-quality, relevant, and in many cases, free. So when you consider what else is available at the click of a mouse, why would anyone want to pay for the generalist content provided by the online department of the traditional newspapers?

3) The Online Competition

It you look at the potential competitors facing the newspapers, other online content providers have a number of significant advantages.

a) Specific

One of the biggest advantages held by internet only content providers is that they aren’t saddled with the burden of being perceived as general content provider.

Instead, they focus on a specific topic and due to this narrower focus are able to provide a deeper and more meaningful level of coverage. This allows them to target a highly specific group of readers who are looking for more in-depth coverage of the topic.

If you want to read a detailed report about the latest test match, would you rather subscribe to a general purpose newspaper that might devote 0.1% of the space to cricket, or would you rather pay to access a membership site entirely devoted to the world of test match cricket?

b) Prolific

Taken as a whole, all the websites and blogs that the newspaper companies are competing against provide a massive volume of relevant, quality content every day. And it’s this constant flow of highly targeted, quality content that makes it much harder for anyone providing general news content to compete.

c) Lower Overheads

Finally, many of the content providers that the newspapers are competing against have extremely low overheads. The cost advantages of being entirely digital cannot be overstated.

These modern, lightweight, electronic content factories don’t have to worry about supporting the enormous expense of print-works, transport infrastructures, newsagent fees or pension deficits that are still carried by the traditional print media.

The Victorian model of physical print production relies upon mass production and the economy of scale to remain viable. So in the face of falling circulation, will only continue to act as a drag upon limited financial resources. In contrast, the online content providers can direct the majority of their revenue towards generating and promoting their content.

So what lessons can online marketers learn from this situation?

1) Relevant, Related Content Is Vital

You must provide closely related content that is designed to appeal to a specific audience. It’s much better to target a smaller audience and give them exactly what they’re looking for, rather than attempt to attract the entire world and fail to impress them.

Just imagine if this blog was a mixture of technology, knitting and horse racing. You would be rather confused and constantly thrown off balance by content that is not relevant to your interests (unless you happen to be interested in technology, knitting and horse racing, although I imagine that would be an extremely specialized niche market).

When you focus on a narrower scope of content it will allow you to provide a sufficient depth of coverage which will cater to the needs of your specific audience.

In turn, your readers will display more loyalty and be more likely to read more of your content more often.

2) Premium Online Information Must Possess Three Qualities

If you want to charge for your content it must be;

a) Unique

The content that you provide must be available only on your site. If people can get the same information elsewhere for free, it’s highly unlikely that they will pay for it.

b) High Quality

People won’t pay for information that is of an inferior quality or information that they can be readily gathered together from a range of sources. There has to be an element of originality or novelty to the content that you provide.

c) Valuable

Your content must provide significant value for your readers, in terms of saving them time, saving them money, helping them to avoid pain or allowing them to improve the quality of their life.

So when taken together, the recent developments in the online newspaper industry show that if you want to be successful providing online information, you have to focus on a specific niche and be committed to providing high quality content that enhances the lives of your readers. And if you want to use the paid content business model, you can multiply the importance of these factors tenfold.

The other day I was reading an interesting magazine article about a new trend called skills swap which has been rediscovered over the last two years.

The premise of skill swapping is simple but powerful. People swap their unique skills for the services provided by like-minded people. No money ever changes hands, just an equivalent value of services.

And it’s this “you scratch my back” mindset which has led to some ingenious trades which have allowed people to achieve the things that they want without great financial expense.

How about getting a patio built in return for teaching somebody to speak french? Or getting business plans drawn up in return for showing somebody the basics of photography? Or even showing someone how to use a mobile phone in return for being shown the art of calligraphy?

It’s possible to benefit from the skills and experiences of just about anyone, provided you’re able to offer them a skill or a talent that they want in return.

And the indications are that even when the world economy improves, skill swapping will continue to grow, with many people predicting the continued movement towards a cashless society.

So with that in mind, what can skill swapping allows us to achieve from a business point of view?

1) Skill Swap For Bootstrapping

This is the art of being able to develop and grow a new business with little capital. At present, this is extremely important due to the inability of the banks to provide finance to help new businesses become established and grow.

The first step is to look at what both you and your business have to offer. Every person and every business has a skill that’s in demand somewhere. Your first job is to identify the skill that you can provide. How can you add value to the lives of other people?

The second step, which will be covered at the end of the article, is to find people who not only want what you provide, but who are also in a position to reciprocate by providing a skill/service that’s required by you or your business.

For example, if you’re a web designer, you could swap your skill in return for accountancy services, PR advice, business coaching or legal advice.

2) Skill Swap For Business Development

The second option is to use skill swapping to enrich the skills of your business team. For example, if you run an online media promotion company, you could help to promote the services of a business consultant in return for them showing you how to run your business more efficiently. It’s a situation where both parties benefit.

Or how about providing the skills and services of your business in return for someone teaching you or your team a foreign language?

And in the field of online business and internet marketing there are several potential avenues that you could explore.

If you need to learn more about copywriting, video production, blogging, podcasting, list building, programming, you’ll always be able to find someone who is willing to teach you in return for one of the skills possessed by your team. The list of opportunities is almost endless.

And as an added bonus, you may find people to work with on future projects or someone in the same line of work with whom you can share your thoughts and concerns about your industry.

3) Skill Swap For Using Spare Capacity

Skill swapping could also be employed to use up spare capacity within your business. Due to the recent business slowdown, many businesses have discovered that the number of orders has dropped and that the same level of demand is no longer present within the economy.

So they’re left in the position of having to cut business costs in order to survive. And in many cases this means reducing the size of their workforce.

In this situation, skill swapping could help to use up the spare capacity of their business and prevent them from having to make people redundant.

So instead of having to move team members from full-time down to part-time work, you may be able to use some of their time to benefit your business in other ways. For example, if you employ a computer programmer within your business and you don’t have enough work to keep them in full time employment, you could in effect hire them out (through skill swapping) to other businesses who need their skills.

In return you could receive various services which will allow you to cut the underlying costs of your business, meaning that you can keep your programmer working full time and avoid interrupting the continuity of your business during these difficult times.

4) Skill Swap For Building Experience

One of the greatest challenges when starting a new business is finding new customers. But to attract new clients and give them confidence in your abilities, it’s important to be able to provide them with evidence of the work that you’ve carried out for other people.

But if you don’t have that evidence it’s difficult to find clients to allow you to build up a portfolio of your previous work. It’s like the situation with the chicken and the egg.

But skill swapping offers the chance to break through this barrier. Going back to our example from earlier with the web-designer and the accountant, if you offer to create a website in exchange for the accountant preparing your tax return, not only will it get the tax authorities off your back, it provides you with evidence of work that you’ve done for a client that can then be shown to other prospective clients.

Skill swapping may be the perfect way to build up an early portfolio of both your work and client testimonials with will make it easier to find more new clients.

And finally, lets look at some of the places where you can find these skill swapping opportunities.

Swapaskill.com

The main site mentioned in the magazine article was www.swapaskill.com which now has 10,000 members and around 30,000 listings of people looking for various skills and services to swap.

Gumtree.com

The second site is www.Gumtree.com which has 2500 skill swap listings at present with around 14,000 people searching these ads every month.

LingoFriends.com

On a more specific subject there’s www.LingoFriends.com which brings people together who want to learn various foreign languages using a combination of forums, email, online telephony and meetups.

And as always, there’s a broad range of sites including Craigslist and other mainstream social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter where you can look for people who have an interest in swapping their unique skills and services.

If you’re willing to consider this type of arrangement and are prepared to get creative, skill swapping can be an extremely rewarding experience both personally and professionally.

If you’ve ever been involved with skill swapping, we’d love to hear about your experiences. What skills did you swap? How did you setup the arrangement? Did it work out well? And have you got any advice for other people who may be considering this growing phenomenon?

Take a moment and share some of your your experiences with the strategies listed above.  Have you tried any of these or used some others great strategies to help save your company time or money.  We would love to hear your feedback and stories

For the last couple of weeks I had noticed my Firefox was starting to run extremely slow (hence my fun lil graphic I made above).  At one point it was taking 3-4 min to open pages that would normally open in seconds.

After many hours of learning how to fix this problem I finally found a way to make Firefox fast again.  Firefox is the second most used browser online and if you’re like me you probably prefer to use Firefox over Microsoft’s IE.

The beauty of using Firefox is it has many great add-ons that can really enhance your online browsing experience. The problem is over time these add-ons can cause your Firefox to start running slow.

Since it took me a while to figure out how to get my Firefox to stop from running so slow, I thought it would be beneficial to put an article together to help others that are experiencing this same issue.

1. Debugging Your Profile

1. Clear Your Cache

The first thing you need to do before you start installing any add-ons, extensions or tweaking your Firefox options is to clear your cache

1. Go to “Tools” then click “Clear Recent History.”
2. Next select “Everything” from the Time Range to Clear dropdown menu. Then place a check mark in the “cache” box area only and leave the others unchecked.

2. Run a Speed Test on Your Firefox

Now that you have cleared your cache you’re going to need to run a speed test on your browser.

1. To do this head on over to Numion and run a speed test on any URL like http://www.titanmediamarketing.com.
2. After you have completed the test note the time.
3. Clear your cache again (using step outlined above). This is very important!
4. Now close Firefox.

Next I am going to take you through a series of tweaks to optimize your Firefox to get it moving quickly again.

After you have completed some of tweaks you will come back to this step and run another speed test to compare the differences.

Step 3 – Check for Duplicate Files

The first thing you need to verify is whether or not your profile folder has any duplicate files. Mozilla application writes or creates certain files inside of your profile folder.  Sometimes these read-only or locked files may cause performance issues.

If this is the case you may see multiple numbered copies of files sitting inside of your profile folder.  What you need to do next is to verify if your files are sequentially numbered (good thing) or multiple numbered copies (bad thing).

Windows Vista Users:

• Click the Windows Start button and type %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ into your Search Box (without hitting Enter). A list of profiles will appear above your Start menu (e.g. xxxxxxxx.default).
• Click on the profile you are currently using. For most users the default profile will be the only file that has been created. After you click on your profile it will open in Windows Explorer.

Windows XP and 2000 Users

• Click the Windows Start button and select Run…
• Type in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ then click OK
• Double-click on the profile you are currently using. For most users the default profile (e.g. xxxxxxxx.default) will be the only file that has been created.

Duplicate files to be aware of…

This folder is where you will see files like bookmarks.html, cert_override.txt, search.sqlite, cookies.txt and some other files and folders.

This is where you want make sure you don’t have any multiple numbered copies of any of these files. For example you should NOT see files like bookmarks{x}.html, cert_override{x}.txt, permissions{x}.sqlite, etc, where {x} represents a number.

You should also make sure there are NO temporary Mozilla files. These look like bookmarks.html.moztmp, cert_override.txt.moztmp, permissions.sqlite.moztmp, etc.  These types of files are usually only present while saving changes to a profile and are removed after changes have been completed.

What causes this problem?

If a file becomes locked or is read-only then Mozilla will automatically create a numbered files. Lets say bookmarks.html becomes locked or is read-only, then the bookmarks.html.moztmp will also become locked or read-only. So Mozilla will then create a new file called bookmarks1.html and so on.

What do I do if I find any of these files?

If you find any duplicate numbered files or Mozilla temporary files then just delete them.

If you are using Norton Antivirus, Google Desktop or Panda then make sure you remove the profile folder from their scans.  Find out more on how to do this at  MozillaZine.

2. Create a New Firefox Profile

If deleting your duplicate files didn’t help to speed up your broswer or you didn’t have any duplicate files then this next step should do the trick for you (this is what worked for me).

Setting up another profile is fairly easy to do.  If your new profile makes your Firefox run like a top again then all you need to do is transfer over some of your files from your old profile to the new one.  I’ll give you some pointers and no-no’s when moving files between old and new profiles.

Let’s Get Started…

1. Close Firefox down by selecting File >> Exit from the menu or clicking the “X” button on the top right of your browser.
2. Windows Vista Users: Click the Windows Start button, then type firefox -P then hit Enter. Windows XP and 2000 Users: Click the Windows Start button and select Run, then type firefox -P then hit Enter.
3. Click the “Create Profile” button.
4. Choose “User Profile”
5. Click “Next” in the “Create Profile Wizard” window.
6. Type in a new name into the “Enter New Profile Name” box and click “Finish”
7. Uncheck the “Don’t Ask at Startup” box (you can modify this later).
8. Finally click the “Start Firefox” box.

This will now start Firefox with your new profile.  If this solves your slow Firefox problem then you can begin to move files from your old profile to your new one you just created.

Warning Before You Move Profile Files or Folders

• It is important that you DO NOT copy over the extensions from one profile to the other. It is best to re-install them.  Read and follow recovering important data from an old profile.
• I highly recommend only moving over a couple files at a time and then starting up Firefox. This will allow you to pinpoint which files or folders are causing your browser to slow down.  I moved one to many over the first time I did this causing me to have to start all over again.

3. Troubleshooting Your Firefox Add-ons / Themes

As I mentioned earlier one of the reasons I love using Firefox is due to many of the great add-ons available to enhance you user experience.  This can also be a cause for slowing down the performance of your browser as well.  You can either have too many active add-ons or one or two that may be causing some sort of conflict with your version of Firefox.

To help eliminate this problem you can open your Firefox in “Safe Mode.”  By doing this you can troubleshoot various things like: modifying the defaults, resetting some of your settings, turning on and off themes or extensions. The great thing about working in this mode is you can compare behaviors in both Safe Mode and Normal Mode.

To Start Firefox in Safe Mode

1. Close Firefox down by selecting File >> Exit from the menu or clicking the “X” button on the top right of your browser.
2. Go to your Windows Start Button >> All Programs >> Mozilla Firefox >> Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode).
3. This will open Firefox in safe mode dialogue.

If your Firefox is running fast in Safe Mode then your Firefox add-ons, extensions, or themes are consuming heaving memory and time.  If this is the case I suggest you head over to Mozilla support to learn how to drop faulty extensions and update add-ons.

Closing Thoughts…

By following the steps above my Firefox is now running at top speed again.  Make sure you take your time troubleshooting through each of these areas listed above.

Let me know how these tips helped you to increase your Firefox performance.  If you have some added tips you would like to share or if I have missed something important please feel free to share with the community.

In a future blog post I will cover off some of my favourite Firefox add-ons for business and personal use. Have a great day everyone.

In today’s post we are going to show you how you can create fresh content quickly and effectively by implementing what we call “Content Creation at the Speed of Sound.”

1. Research Topic

Step one is to research your topic thoroughly

You can visit other sites, blogs, watch videos or read reports to keep up to date with all the cutting edge of your topic.

As you do this, look for the pains and desires within your target market. What solutions are the people looking for?

Next, do a Google search for your topic followed by the word problems, and search relevant forums for frequently asked questions within the community

2. Research Keywords

The next stage is to research your keywords

During the research phase, you should be noting common words that appear within the community that you’re targeting.

Once you’ve got a range of keywords, spend time finding the level of traffic and competition that adhere to each of the keyword phrases. You can use some great keyword research tools like Market Samurai,  Word Tracker or Google Keyword Tool to help you achieve this.

Once you’ve got a long list of potential keywords that are regularly searched for yet don’t have too much competition, select 2-3 keyword phrases that you want to target with your video.

3. Create Videos

Step three is the creation of your videos

You can use screen capture software, or if you have a video camera you can make a talking head video where you talk in front of the camera. Alternatively, you can create a simple slide show video using text and images.

The first video should be roughly three minutes in length and be a basic introduction to the topic. The aim of this video is to distribute around the various video sharing sites in order to encourage people to visit your blog.

Video two should be slightly longer, perhaps five minutes and go into more detail about the subject. The aim is to provide quality blog content for your viewers, and also to get them to sign up to your blog.

4. Video Transcription

Once you’ve completed your videos, get them transcribed

There are various people on Elance, Rentacoder and Craigslist who are willing to do this for a reasonable price. Just make sure that they’ve got good accuracy and they can guarantee a good turnaround speed for the work.

Remember, speed is vital when online media marketing is considered.

5. Blog Post

Next, post the content to your blog

If you don’t have a blog, WordPress.org provides the best software on the market and it’s free. Once you’ve got your blog setup, you should post your second video and the transcription of it to your blog.

This will provide good content for both the search engines and your visitors.

The act of posting on your blog will also activate all the various syndication mechanisms such as RSS feeds. It will also ping various networks and directories. Any subscribers who have signed up to receive blog notifications will be told and you can email your list.

If you don’t already use Aweber, they provide excellent integration between your blog and your list of subscribers.

6. Podcast

The next stage is to turn your content into a podcast

First, convert video two into audio, then register it with various podcast directories, such as Podcast, Podcastalley, Podcastblaster and Odeo. There a several other podcast directories you can find if you use the search engines.

Finally, setup an iTunes account to get exposure to this massive market.

7. Social Networks

Now it’s time to notify your social networks

This includes sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and any other social networks that match the style of the visitors that you’re seeking.

Finally, you can automate these actions using various plugins. Facebook provide a plugin that will integrate with your blog so that you’re latest blog updates automatically appear on your Facebook account or fan page.

The WordPress community also provides a wide range of plugins that can be used to automate each of these actions.

8. Distribute Video

Next, it’s time to distribute your first video

You can send it out to YouTube, Revver, Veoh, Viddler, Clipser and many more.

Then you may want to use the social bookmarking sites to bookmark the links to the videos that you’ve just submitted to the video sharing sites.

Then, take the transcription of the first video, turn it into articles and submit it to various article sites, such as EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.

9. End Result

So what is the end result?

After one to two hours of work, you should have a blog post, good content and contact with your subscribers and social media interaction.

You should also have a variety of incoming links to your blog (which will gradually increase over time as people spontaneously link to the good content provided on your site).

All of that should help to with the search engine rankings for the keywords that you’ve chosen.