The Content Blender

It amazes me how many publications I read where there are glaring spelling mistakes. Some people rely on their computer’s spell check, but that may be lulling us into lassitude about good common sense spelling. Every writer should have at least one dictionary, though several would be even better. Learn that the dictionary is your pal, with a flick of a few pages you can spell something the right way instead of the wrong way.

Even the most educated person can put out writing that contains obvious spelling errors. I don’t want to send an editor a manuscript with glaring mistakes that make me look unprofessional. There is never a right time to relax over spelling. Now if it seems I am obsessed with the subject, I am. Since the advent of computers and spelling aids I find a real carelessness in printed material.

When young people ask me what I feel is important for a good writer to master, I tell them editing and careful attention to the words you are using. Manuscripts come to me with the most outrageous errors. These should have been caught before ever submitting the write to a publisher, or someone you wish to have look over your work. If in doubt, look it up. There are many good dictionary programs on the computer where you just enter the word you want, or as close to it as possible, and the program will help you with your definition.

Some of the most common mistakes are different spellings for words that sound the same. For instance, who’s and whose. Just remember that the first spelling is a contraction of who is, as in who’s coming to the party. You can figure out many words with a little thought and logic. In grade school our Principal came into the classroom and said principal, with that spelling was easy if you remembered that the principal is your “pal”. That stuck with me.

I use other memory tricks with words. Take dessert and desert. How to remember those? I think of a desert being a barren place, so has only one ’s’. It doesn’t matter what triggers you use, mnemonics can be a great tool. Another puzzler is with your and you’re. Again we look to the you’re to know it is a contraction, while your is a possessive.

Spell check is a great help, but it can add to spelling errors. If the word you use is in the dictionary, it may not show it as an error, even though it is. This is when you use editing and proof-reading to catch such flaws. If an editor sees your submission is proofed and neatly put together, as well as having no spelling errors, your submission will have a much better chance than one with errors.

If you want to be a productive writer, attention to detail is a must. There are thousands of writers out there and your work must have that extra edge to be accepted. Writing is hard work and you must decide how much effort you are willing to expend to assure it is your best work.

Sherry Asbury is a freelance writer/poet who edits and critiques new writers as well as having a desk-top poetry
magazine called Poet Speak Digest. Her work has been published in a wide array of venues and has spanned over forty years. She lives with her two rescue-ferrets, Amber and Rascal. Sherry is an advocate for the homeless, appears regularily in a local homeless advocation newspaper. Battered women and animal cruelty are also a focus of her attention.

Acupuncture is a method that originated in China over 5000 years ago. It is a holistic practice that is based on the belief of releasing blocked energy or “chi” in living beings. These energy lines circulate through twelve invisible energy lines known as meridians of the body. Each meridian is associated with a different organ system in your body so the needle insertions in each of these meridians reduce the respective disease associated with that meridian point.

What acupuncture can do?

Usually people suffer from diseases when energy gets blocked in the meridians. When the needles are inserted into the specific points along the meridian lines, the balanced flow of energy is restored. Acupuncture works effectively because the needles stimulate the release of pain-relieving endorphins into the body, influences the release of neurotransmitters and also enhances the working of autonomic nervous systems. By influencing the electrical currents in the body, acupuncture also improves blood circulation throughout the body.

School of acupuncture therapy

School of acupuncture therapy provides acupuncture-training courses to all practitioners. These courses help them to perform various acupuncture treatments to reduce diseases in human beings. The acupuncture therapy school teaches the acupuncturists to perform a number of treatments like acupuncture with needles and acupuncture without needles.

Acupuncture with needles include curing disorders like head and neck pains, migraines, cervical spondylitis, Azoospermia, genitor-urinary systems like bed-wetting in children, laryngitis, earache, depression, arthritis, deafness, schizophrenia and skin disorders like Acne, psoriasis, and falling hair. Sometimes the needles are electrified to produce better results. This also helps in curing smoking, alcoholism and drug addictions.

Other unique acupuncture treatment offered by acupuncture schools

Needle-less acupuncture includes techniques like Moxibustion, Soft Laser Therapy, Cupping Therapy, and Ultrasonopuncture.

1. Sujok Acupuncture - the acupuncture schools offers this unique technique where the expert uses only his hands and legs. He inserts microscopic needles into the points or even a sesame seed and small magnets that relieve the patients instantly.
2. Acutron Mentor Acupuncture - this is one of the most advanced techniques that use electro curative apparatus that offers micro current therapies and interferential current through the needles. It is advantageous because it can be used for pain management and treating all types of diseases.

Special training methods of acupuncture NYC

Other significant acupuncture treatments are offered by Acupuncture NYC [New York City] center. The main advantage of their techniques is confirmed remedy and there are no side effects. They heal severe cases of menstrual disorders, PMS, endometriosis, cysts and fibroids, hot flashes, arthritis, infertility problems in men and women, pregnancy problems, circulation problems, digestive disorders, ulcerative colitis, diarrhea and constipation.

The ancient method of acupuncture truly helps in stress management strategies and rebalances the body’s energetic forces to achieve harmony and sense of well being.

We have made the most comprehensive research on acupuncture. Find it only on acupuncture for sinus headache migrains and more. All about acupuncture on LeanderNet - http://www.leandernet.com

Year after year harassment claims dominate the news with big dollar settlements. Company’s names are tarnished and reputations are destroyed. And at the same time, company morale plummets, organizational trust is ruined and lives are changed forever. Why?

Why do claims continue? And why don’t some employers ever get it? The fact is, most employers do. More and more employers are taking the steps to ensure that harassment does not occur in their workplace. But for those who do not, the costs have the potential to destroy their company. Time after time I see in my consulting practice that when harassment and its associated behaviors are allowed to flourish, other problems follow, including low productivity, poor quality and service, and high absenteeism and turnover. Why? When employees are not treated with respect and dignity, when employees are not valued, then bad things happen. Morale declines, pride in work disappears, and company loyalty walks out the door.

Where harassment is not tolerated, where it is immediately addressed if it occursa clear message is signaled to all employees: we care. When employers take care of their employees, employees take care of their organization.

So what must organizations do to ensure that they have a harassment free workplace? There are five key steps to take:

1. Send the message loud and clear to all employees (and vendors, customers, and visitors) that harassment of any kind will not be tolerated here. And if it does occur, it will be dealt with swiftly and severely. Let me tell you a story of how this message was powerfully delivered by one of my clients. I had completed training a group of the company’s managers in sexual harassment prevention during their corporate retreat. The program was the last component of a long, three day program and this training was to be followed by a weekend of recreation. Before exiting, the Human Resource Manager met with me and the President to inform him that an employee in one of their out-of-state facilities had reported that she had been harassed by one of the managers. Upon hearing this, the President cancelled his well deserved round of golf, flew to the facility, spent the weekend investigating the complaint, and by Monday morning concluded the investigation, determined that the harassment did in fact occur, and terminated the offending manager. What a visible and powerful message the President sent to allharassment will not occur in my company!!

2. Model respectful behavior. Position and power does not mean dominance and disrespect. Productive companies value and respect all their employees, regardless of their position or gender. They foster a culture that can best be described as egalitarian.

3. Train all managers annually on harassment prevention and investigation procedures. Educate all employees on harassment with a clear message that we won’t tolerate it, but if it occurs we will protect you and we will do something about it.

4. Have clear policy in placeand make sure that everyone reads it and understands it. There must never be any question in anyone’s mind about the company’s position and everyone must know what will happen if harassment occurs.

5. Train everyone in interpersonal communications and conflict resolution. Give employees the tools to address problems as they occurbut always provide them with a safety net if they can’t resolve the issue.

There is no place in the workplace for harassment. Employers need to get that.

Rick Dacri is an organizational development consultant, coach and featured speaker at regional and national conferences. Since 1995 his firm, Dacri & Associates has focused on improving the performance of individuals and organizations. Rick can be reached at 1-800-892-9828, rick@dacri.com, or http://www.dacri.com.

The objective of this article is to teach a unique method of lead generation through reverse marketing.

Reverse marketing is the method of getting real time leads for free by responding to any offer you can find related to your niche market. The idea behind this is that people advertise things for which they have an interest. Somebody selling weight loss information will be always interested in looking out more and more information to improve the quality of his product and make more sales.

Before we get into the concept you can utilize the method to do reverse marketing to get leads. But you must avoid the spamming in the process. We don’t advice to join a bunch of lists and emaling the list owners. This will be treated as spam in the most cases, and it’s not very productive because online list owners know what spam is, and they certainly don’t like it.

You can follow following steps to start your reverse marketing campaign.

1. Go to a search engine and put a keyword or phrase, such as “Lead Generation”.
2. Browse the hundreds of websites that come back in the search results.
3. For each website, note the physical (snail mail) address and contact name of the owner of the website.
4. Send out postcards with your offer to those people.

If you have several different products, you can do this over and over again with different markets. For example, let’s say you have a product on gardening. Just go to a search engine, enter “gardening,” and then contact those people as possible leads for your product. This way you can generate highly responsive leads for your business.

For more information on Lead Generation visit site www.leadgenerationart.com

Let me ask you a question:

If you pick up an article from an article directory and post it on your site, will your page/site be penalised?

From what I have read on forums and in emails recently, a lot of people think they will be penalised for using these articles. My own opinion on this is no, it wont get your page or site penalised.

The topic of duplicate content is often hotly debated on forums, and to be honest, I don’t know where all the misinformation is coming from. People use the term “duplicate content filter” without applying any common sense to the situation.

As with anything related to SEO, the internet provides you with a laboratory to test your theories.

Let me describe a couple of my tests.

One of my articles was published on my own site. Google indexed the article, and my site was the only place with that article. Searching for the title, I was the only site listed in Google. I then submitted that article to ezinearticles.com. I waited for Google to find it, and then searched for my title again. Guess what? EzineArticles.com was listed as #1 and my site as #2. Even though Google knew the article originated from my site and therefore ezinearticles had “copied” it. Google still ranked the ezinearticles duplicate ahead of mine. If there is a duplicate content filter then it certainly did not apply to ezinearticles in this instance.

Not convinced?

I wrote an article some time ago and submitted it to several article directories. The title of the article was:

“How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic”

Go to Google and search for it. Put the title inside quotations so that you only find pages with that exact phrase in them.

I currently get over 17,000 results returned for that article. Look at each of the first 10 results. When I did it, all 10 were my article.

You can continue onto page 2 and check those results.

Surely if there was a duplicate content filter in place that penalised duplication of articles across web sites, we would not see this reprinting of my article across all these sites?

Using articles from article directory sites will not get your page penalised for duplicate content.

Where duplicate content will hurt you, is when you republish the same article (or parts of an article) on your site, several times (even if you change the main keyword running through the article). This penalty may also cause you problems if you publish the same article across multiple sites that you own (yes, Google knows which sites belong to the same webmaster).

Advice: If you make every page on every one of your sites unique, the duplicate content filters are not going to cause you problems.

What does the future hold? Well, it seems Microsoft are developing an algorithm to check for duplication of phrases within pages. This algorithm will find articles built around the same core phrases. Duplicate content filters are certainly getting smarter, so why not future-proof your sites now by adding unique, valuable content. It may take longer, but it will last longer too.

Andy Williams offers a variety of free reports related to internet marketing and a weekly newsletter.