I’m currently working on ways to improve my wealth. Day 1…

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Everyone has to deal with customer service in one form or another. Whether we giving it or receiving it, we’re smack dab in the middle of it and my question is, what the heck happened to it??? Is a lack of customer service the main reason that businesses fail?

Did GM suffer because they failed to pay attention to their customers? Has bad customer service caused us, the consumer, to shop online more?

Speaking from my personal experience, this is exactly the case. I prefer to shop at stores where they have self-check, stores where there is very little interaction between myself and someone else. I often find myself in situations that aren’t handled correctly by businesses. It is my personal belief that I go through this because I am a soft spoken, young, black female, but people should let the soft voice fool them. I’m a bit of a pistol when I get upset. I don’t like to be treat like I’m nothing when I spend my hard earned money at a business. I recently purchased a bedroom suit from the RoomStore and I paid in CASH. They told me that all of my pieces where in except one and that piece would be in at the beginning of May. Needless to say. I haven’t seen it yet. I get a call saying that the pieces arrival date had been pushed back to early June, it’s now late June and I hadn’t hear a peep from them. I decided to stroll into the store to see what was going on. They tell me oh it’s going to be in sometime in July. Now come on…. Could you have at least called me and told me that? Could you have apologized? Could you have offered me some sort of discount for my trouble?

These people did none of that. They refused to help me they took no responsibility. They offered no solution. They told me it wasn’t their fault that the piece wasn’t in and they said I could have a refund with 14 days via mail. I was highly offended by the response.

The manager there was an even bigger surprise. He told me he would call me back ans he never did.

Long story short. I felt like they didn’t want my business…

How do we teach these business that satisfying their customers should be their main objective???

I can pretty much guarantee you that the RoomStore will be out of business within the next 5 to 10 years.

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• Sad News: Actress Brittany Murphy Dead at 32
• How to Increase Website Traffic on a Budget

I’ve found this out the hard way. Initially we were expecting people to flock to our blog, but when that wasn’t happening I had to dig deeper into all of my resources, i.e. the books I had already purchased and the Internet to find out what I was doing wrong. After studying this almost everyday, I began to make some changes to the way that I did some things. I changed how I did my post tags, how I listed my categories, how I titled my photos, I focused on the keywords that I used, I began to talk about things that most people were not talking about (unique content) and I analyzed my site through several different SEO checkers.

Before I realized that changes needed to be made to my blog, I had made certain that I had at least ten tags to each post, something that harms more than it does good. My categories consisted of names, something that wasn’t unique to my site. I never created titles for my images, I would use the title that was given to me which included random numbers and letters, HUGE mistake. I was also using keywords that were completely generic and not search engine specific. I also talked about the same things that everyone else was talking about ,something that you see often when visiting other blogs and websites and I had no idea that my website could be analyzed my robots.

My thought process behind creating ten plus post tags, often referred to as post keywords, was that the more I had the more likely it would be that someone would be searching for one of these and the more likely they would come to my site. So, I downloaded a plug-in that would automatically place tags on posts for me. The plug-in in would go through my post and created phrases and names that were important in search engines like Yahoo and Google. I was able to determine how many words were chosen based on each search engine, I chose seven words per search engine. This was a huge mistake. I submitted my site through a search engine that told me I had too many post keywords. I was thinking, “what a crock”, but I took it and ran with it. I began to go through my 2,000 plus keywords and reduced them to under 600. I took out keywords that like Miami, Dress, TV, things that had little to no significance to my blog. When I did this, I noticed that more traffic began to flow to my site almost immediately. People began to land on my tag pages, something that was not happening before. I’d never seen and entry page that include tags. This increased my traffic site, by a more than 50 visits per day. Remember 50 visits more a day is 50 visits more than I had yesterday and 50 visits that came to my site instead of my competitors.

I also began to study websites that I was competing with and compare them to mine. I noticed that many of my competitors used unique categories, so I began to look at their site statistics to see just how their traffic was entering their website and I saw that people were entering through their unique categories, but no one had enter through mine. I began to change my categories, instead of using the names of celebrities and places, I began to use broader terms that would cover a wide array of topics, for example, Fabulous in Film, would cover any actress or actor. I began to see traffic trickle in, maybe one or two visits a day, but it was one to two visits more than I had the day before.

I also noticed that people were visiting my competitors site via images, so I sought to find out why. When I looked at it I realized that, their images had specific names, an example of this would be ‘Beyonce at the Eiffel Tower’ instead of 48jfu575kfk.  I also realized that there was a section when I uploaded my images that said alt text, I began to research what alt text was. I found out that the alt text in an image is how search engines decide what the image contains, so I began to name my image specifically and use that name as the alt text as well. By doing this, my images began to skyrocket in google images. Many of them to number one. This brings great traffic to my site, but one thing you have to realize is that traffic from google images does not come the same day or even week you post them to your site. Many times the traffic comes a month or two after the image has already been on your site, but I’ve received between five and ten thousand visits from single images over a months time.

While studying my competition, I also took note of the keywords, or meta tags, they were using for their site. You can easily determine this by viewing the source of their website. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by going to View – Source in the task bar, look for meta name “keywords”. I determined that my keywords we silly. I was simply using the names of celebrities, which in itself isn’t bad, but I may only talk about that person once. I began to use meta tags that were common to my blog. I also added meta tags that I knew people would search for. This helped me to improve my SEO ranking tremendously, bringing my score up more than 15 percent and that’s a great thing. You may not directly see evidence of this, but you will see and increase in the number of hits you get simply because your posts will began to rank higher on search engines.

I then remember that I kept reading about unique content, I kept thinking, if I’m writing about celebrities, how can my content be unique??? Then I had the bright idea to include those celebrities that most people dismissed. So I began to talk about small time actors and actress that are not in mainstream media, celebrities that you and I both would know by face, but not as much by name. People are still searching for these people and they want to know what they are up too. This helped me out as well, because when people searched for those celebrities, my posts would be on the first page of their search engine as few bloggers mentioned them. I’ve received thousands of hits on little known celebrities. This also helps when these celebrities began to gain notoriety.

I’ve mentioned several times already that I’ve analyzed my site. There are tons of SEO checkers and website analyzers that you can find by searching google. My advice would be to use as many of them as you can because each one of them will give you bits of information that will help you with your SEO  optimization.

Hopefully you’ve noticed that all of the tactics that I’ve used are free. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to increase traffic, especially if you don’t have it. I’ve even found that using advertising like Google AdWords helps, but very little. Many of the people that come from ads fail to return, giving you little or no return on your investment.

If you take one thing away from this post, let it be that time and patience goes a long way. If you don’t see and increase in traffic tomorrow, DON’T GIVE UP. If you give up, you will never see and increase, but if you stick with your site and constantly post to your site, your hard work will pay off.

Visit my site pointemout.com to take a look at some of these tactics at work.

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• Sad News: Actress Brittany Murphy Dead at 32
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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to watch Denzel Washington’s latest film The Book of Eli and the film was amazing, it reminded me of another film, Blindness which starred, Julianne Moore. Anywho… both films show human nature in it’s most desperate form. They shows us just how lucky most of us truly are. In The Book of Eli, we’re brought to apost-apocalyptic world where people struggle, kill, cheat, and lie to survive. A world where only a select few know who God is, where people have to barter for drinking water and kill to stay alive. In Blindness, we’re brought to a world where life as we know it no longer exists. The entire population succumbs to an epidemic that causes nearly everyone to go blind. We witness people take advantage of, rape, and starve each other.

Well, this got me to thinking about the things that I take for granted. How many times do we fight with the people that we love, how often do we take tomorrow for granted, and what’s most important to me? During both of these films, I found myself wondering, which side of the spectrum would I be, would I be the one that sits back and watch as others are taken advantage of, would I be the one taking advantage of others, or would I be someone that could lead others into a better place.

What I have come to realize is this. I must make some changes in my life. Instead of me harboring hate and envy, I must embrace love and kindness. While I tend not to hold on to grudges, I do keep people that have hurt me at a distance. I start my blog POINTEMOUT.COM back in January of 2009 (most of that content no longer exists), but if you’d read it between now and then, you’d know that I’ve changed my tune. I used to go in on some of these celebrities for no good reason. The main one was none other than… Beyonce and the chick has never done anything to me. When I think about it, the way that I was bashing Beyonce was no different than the way the bad guys were intimidating and killing innocent people in those films that I mentioned.

My point is… when does it stop. If I’ll verbally bash someone of no good reason, whose to say that I wouldn’t do the same thing physically. Well.. I can now. My life is no longer better because I make others more miserable. My life is better because I uplift and inspire people to do better for themselves and others.

 Take a long look into who you are as a person now. If you treat people like they don’t matter now, how will you treat them when your backs against the wall. Will you walk all over them or will you team up with them??? Just some food for thought!!! The person that you are today, doesn’t have to be who you are tomorrow, but tomorrow isn’t promised, so change today.

Check out both films, they really make you think about who you are and what’s important to you.

Related Posts

• Check Out Denzel Washington in His Upcoming Film, the Book of Eli

Have a Merry Christmas

 and a Happy New Year!!!

Most Commented Posts

• Sad News: Actress Brittany Murphy Dead at 32
• How to Increase Website Traffic on a Budget

Stay tuned for great updates and info!!!

P.S. You will see a lot of Rihanna, because I thinks she is absolutely the fly-est chica in the game!!!

Most Commented Posts

• Sad News: Actress Brittany Murphy Dead at 32
• How to Increase Website Traffic on a Budget