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Summary: Who says snorkeling is only on the Bahamas? Mexicoís Acapulco does offer a lot in terms of snorkeling too.

Who says snorkeling is only on the Bahamas? Mexicoís Acapulco does offer a lot in terms of snorkeling too. Though the most ideal spots are accessible by motorized boats alone, once you get the chance to rent (or procure it by other means) you would be grateful for the effort.

Probably the best place for snorkeling in Acapulco is in Isla la Roqueta. Here the water can be as deep as 30 feet but youíd be convinced it is nowhere more than 10 feet since the water is exceedingly crystal clear. Take a glass bottom boat if you can to maximize your snorkeling in Acapulco experience. Isla la Roqueta may not offer much in terms of corals and marine diversity but it do have an endless patch of marine vegetation that house multitudes of fishes. Isla la Roqueta DO has plenty of fishes to see. Even just by skimming the surface, schools of them will pass any swimmer often, completely unafraid. And donít forget to seek the submerged statue of the Lady of Guadalupe.

You could head also to Puerto Marques for your snorkeling in Acapulco experience. This snorkeling location is located 15 kilometers southeast of Acapulco. You can either take a boat or drive down the coastal highway and take a turnoff the road. This is also a frequent area so there are persons who do ëwatchesí for your car and stuffs for a dollar. Anything should be safe, but it is generally advised not to bring highly valuable items. Keep stuffs like purses and black bags out of site. In the trunk or anywhere as long as it remains hidden from plain site.

Puerto Marques provides an excellent snorkeling in Acapulco experience. Noted mostly for its shallow and clear waters, Puerto Marques do offer an interesting aquatic habitat.

Playas Caleta & Caletilla is the best place to gaze at the Mexican diversity and culture. Listen to a guitar tune, drink a cerveza, and try the white cheese dip and a tortilla, and of course a snorkeling in Acapulco experience. Gorgeous scenery underwater and above, calm waters and lots and lots of colorful fun, thatís why Playas Caleta & Caletilla is Acapulcoís most traditional beach.

The sunken ship Rio de la Plata makes an excellent underwater scenery, just perfect for snorkeling. This sunken ancient ship lies in the waters of Icacos located in the Zona Dorada. Donít miss this underwater spectacle, but be sure you know how to swim to a moderate depth.

Too bad, just like in Isla la Roqueta, other sites for snorkeling in Acapulco couldnít get any better. Due to the number of native bathers that hardly responsible that frequented the area, these marine habitats suffered dearly. Still, by government restoration and strict laws, this snorkeling place credits among the best Acapulco experience.

Perry-James, Cole is the webmaster for http://www.something4u.com, an upcoming web-site that provides information on Health, Laws, Money, Religion, and many other topics.

More On Nutrients

Do you know that nutrients are important to us? Nutrients perform specific functions in the nourishment of the body. Right!!!! Of major importance are supplying the body with the necessary calories for energy and ensuring the continuity of the vital functions. Nutrients include protein, carbohydrate, fat, minerals, vitamins and water. So to keep my promises to you, Dr Chef will elaborate more on this issue.

Taste and Aroma: The substances which stimulate the perception of taste and aroma are not vitally necessary from the nutritional standpoint; on the other hand, they are necessary for increasing the appetite and for stimulating the digestive glands.

Fiber is necessary as a preventive measure for a wide range of disease processes.

Diet is the food consumed daily by an individual or group with an emphasis on nutrient content.

Modified diets: Special regimens prescribed as measures for prevention, control and or treatment of certain disease states.

The factors above are important for maintenance of health in the human body. Daily consumption of minimum servings of important food groups and recommended allowances for essential nutrients provides the basis for balance nutrition. Other factors such as food preparation procedures affect the nutritive value of food.

There are lots of supplement food and beverages that we can find everywhere in the market nowadays. It can be found in the form of tablets, tea or coffee, powder or injection (Vitamins). DO make sure that you don’t take unnecessary supplement because this will affect your healthiness.

TIP OF THE DAY

BEAN SPROUT

Normally, bean sprout are easier to be blistered/smelly, so to avoid this, put it in a container soak with water (1kg bean sprout) and add one or two spoonful of vinegar. This will make it last longer and crispy……..

From the back desk,

Dr. Chef

Dr. Chef, Webmaster for http://www.easy-home-cooking.com .Dr. Chef has been a chef in hotel around the world.From China to India, Middle East to South Africa and Canada to Australia. Now retired as a chef and doing a consultant company in restaurant and hotel business in south East-asia.

When deciding on an internet marketing strategy, there are many decisions to be made. One of the most basic is whether to pursue natural and organic search engine results or to use paid placement. Of course, your company may choose to do a combination of both.

Organic or Natural SEO is the pursuit of web site traffic by placing high in the SERPs or Search Engine Results Page. Organic results is what occurs when you type in a key word like “Home Mortgate” and FannieMae.com and other mortgage brokers show up. This is different from Pay Per Click Advertising which are the sponsored links that are also placed on the page. You do not pay for organic results. They are the result of either search engine optimization or just dumb luck.

Ranking high for targeted key words in the search engines can make a measurable difference to your business. However, since it is so profitable, ranking for competitive keywords often requires the help of a professional SEO consultant.

Also, the search engines are always concerned about the integrity of their results, so a SEO campaign targeting organic results can often take a considerable amount of time before you see results. This can be unnerving especially if you are a small business that relies on the internet for results.

Paid advertisement on the search engines, also known as Pay Per Click Campaigns allow a new web site to immediately place itself on the top of search results. This is a great benefit especially if you have a new domain name that is experiencing the Sandbox or time delay that search engines sometimes impose in order to weed out spam. Also, a pay per click campaign can give you immediate information on which keywords are the most effective. If you track the information carefully, you can also see which ads are leading to sales.

There are some significant issues however. A Pay Per Click campaign can be costly, especially for competitive key words. It is imperative that a company does an ROI (Return On Investment) to make sure that it makes economic sense to bid on the key words. I have seen many companies set up expensive campaigns and then completely ignore the results. This is a really good way to throw away money. If you don’t have the time or resources to monitor your campaign then this is not a good strategy for you. Also, be sure to check your ROI. If you are generating a lot of traffic but the money you are making from it doesn’t cover your campaign cost, it doesn’t make sense to continue.

Though organic search results require more of an investment up front, in the long run, they are a more sustainable way to drive traffic to your web site. What is imperative, however, is that you do a thorough job of researching keywords before beginning. You do not want to spend your valuable time generating embedded anchor links only to decide the keywords you targeted are not the best. You will want to make sure you know which are the most effective keywords to target. Web sites like http://www.wordtracker.com/ and http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ are good places to start.

This is also one way that the two approaches can work together. You can use a Pay Per Click campaign to research which key words bring in the most traffic and result in the most sales.

These are a few of the issues to think about when embarking on a Search Engine Marketing Campaign. No matter which strategy or combination of strategies you decide upon, make sure you have thought about the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches then take the path that makes the most sense for you.

Mary Lewis-Pierce is a consultant who provides SEO for the small business and non-profit web site. She specializes in organic search results. To learn how to increase traffic to your site, visit her at http://www.seo-boston.com.

What happens if you build a website and no one shows up? You spend hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on a site that gets a few visitors at best and certainly isn’t selling your books. For the most part, authors assume that Internet promotion stops once their site is up. But the harsh truth is that with all the sites popping up every day, yours will likely get lost in the shuffle unless you promote it.

Some years back, my company began pushing authors out to the ‘Net to help increase their exposure and get into markets they might not otherwise have access to. In early 2005 I began pulling together what we’d learned and positioning it in a powerful new promotional program we call The Virtual Author Tour™, a campaign that exists only on the ‘Net and one that you can implement too.

If the thought of virtual promotion is confusing, think of it this way: let’s say you build a wonderful store in the middle of an Iowa corn field. The only problem is there are no roads leading to it. A tour on the ‘Net is like paving a super highway to your “store” and to tell you the truth, it’s really the only way surfers will find you.

To begin your own tour you need to have a good understanding of who your audience is and where they hang out on the ‘Net. For some readers it will be in blogs (also called web logs), for others it might be chat groups, message boards or discussion groups but for most, it’s a combination of all of these.

Whatever it is, you should be able to begin tracking them down by doing a quick Google search on your topic or market. Your first search will bring you back a slew of sites, some of them great and some of them not-so-great. The first portion of the tour will take the most time because you’re going to have to investigate the sites to see how effective they might be in your promotional efforts.

One way to gauge this is to see what their Google page rank is. You can type the site into the following link and get a fairly good idea of where they rank: http://mygooglepagerank.com/ or you can load the Google toolbar into your Internet Explorer and get results each time you land on a page. Few sites will rank 10, but if the sites you’re looking at are 5 and above, you’re generally in the ballpark of sites worthy of a pitch. We will typically toss back anything that’s 4 and below unless the topic is very niche and the sites don’t get lots of hits because of a smaller market.

Once you have your list of sites, you’ll need to begin pitching them. Most often this is the area where authors get stuck. Why? Because they’re focused on selling their books. Regardless of who you’re pitching, you should never, ever sell your book. Always sell what your book can do for the reader and believe me, web sites, blogs, chat groups and discussion forums are always looking for books that will appeal to their demographic.

As you’re pulling together your tour, don’t overlook ezine article banks, these can be powerful too. If you’re unfamiliar with them take a peek at http://www.articlecity.com/ and you’ll see what I mean. This site archives hundreds of thousands of articles just waiting to be selected and placed in ezines. The good thing about this is that you never know the size of the ezine you’ll get placed in. It could have a readership of 500 or 20,000. Another good reason to do article submission is for the incoming links. Most of the main search engines change their algorithms quite frequently, doing this causes sites to go up and down in ranking but incoming links from websites, chats, blogs, and article placement can help give a site more consistent ranking rather than being at the mercy of an algorithm change.

And no virtual tour would be complete without a website, so let’s circle back to where we started, that all important author site. Do you have one? If you don’t you should not begin your virtual tour until you do. If you do have one, take a long, hard look at your site and see if it’s ready for virtual exposure. By this I mean that often times, websites aren’t nearly as “ready” as they could be. Why? Well for one your site design is really driven by your audience. Colors, styles, and wording will all depend on who you’re marketing to. Do you need lots of information or very little? All of this will depend on who your reader is. My site for example: http://www.amarketingexpert.com is packed with information. Why? Because authors and publishers arrive at my site hungry for knowledge so having articles, tips and lots of free information on there is necessary to not only get my audience to the site, but to keep them there.

Getting to know your reader is one of the most important components of any campaign and is especially true when you’re trying to go from a ho-hum site, to one that’s making the grade and converting visitors into customers. Do you know what your site conversion rate is? If you don’t you should; ask your web designer or site host for this information. It’s typically delivered in something called an Urchin report which is fairly easy to read and a wealth of information. If your site isn’t up to par, consider getting it Internet ready before you launch your tour. If you’re spending all this time sending folks to your site, you’ll want them to convert into buyers otherwise your time spent on the ‘Net is wasted.

Unlike a real tour around the country, a virtual tour isn’t associated with any timeline per se and it’s certainly not as expensive as the cost of travel and lodging. The impact from a tour, however, can be felt for a long time. The reason for this is that unlike print or broadcast media, every step you take on the ‘Net leaves a footprint. And the more footprints you have, the more times you’ll come up in a search and the more hits you’ll get on your site.

Also, consider this: the impact of going directly to your audience cannot be overstated. Rarely are you given the opportunity to gain direct access to your readers as you are on the ‘Net. You can’t accomplish this in a bookstore or even in the best news piece. And while traditional media and bookstore placement offer great promotional leverage, the ‘Net offers something that no other marketing programs do: a direct pipeline to your readers. So if you haven’t “gone virtual” you should consider it. No campaign is complete without it.

Wishing you virtual success!

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a book marketing and media relations expert whose company has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. Visit http://www.amarketingexpert.com

Most people are aware of the fact that Google™ is by far the most important search engine in the world today. Many webmasters have also heard that having other websites post links to your website should improve your rankings in the search engines, especially in Google™. This is certainly true. The problem is that many webmasters do not know the correct way of soliciting links from other sites.

Why is it important that other sites link to yours? It can be seen as a sort of confirmation that one site values the content of another site. When you find a site on the net that is useful because it has good content that you are interested in you normally save it as a favorite. The same principle applies to website links. The more sites link to your site the higher the perceived value of your site on the net and that has a direct impact on your site’s ranking.

There are many sites on the internet that exist for only one reason and that is to show webmasters how they can improve their search engine rankings by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. I do not want to comment too much on SEO sites except to say that although there are some very good SEO sites on the net I have found most of them to have no value at all. However, one thing that most SEO sites agree upon is the importance of having incoming links to your site in order to improve your site’s rankings in the search engines.

I am often surprised at how many people follow the advice of SEO sites on how they can improve their site’s ranking in Google™ without even considering what Google™ has to say on this topic. Nevertheless, Google™ is very clear on the importance of incoming links.

Take the time to read the “Webmaster Guidelines” issued by Google™. You can find these valuable guidelines at www.google.com/support/webmasters and then click on “Webmaster Guidelines”. They are very clear.

In principle, links should come from sites with content that is relevant to your own site. It can be similar or complementary. These sites should link to your site because they find your site’s content valuable and consider it to be useful for their own visitors

There are mainly two ways of soliciting links from other webmasters:

The one is by looking for sites with content that is relevant to your own site and requesting these webmasters to post a link to your site. You normally need to give them your site’s title, website address and a short description of what your site is all about in order for them to consider adding your link on their site. It is normal that they often request you to first post a link on your site linking back to their site (and provide them with the link address to verify you have placed the link) before considering linking to yours. Many of these sites will invite other webmasters on their home page to link to their site or inform other webmasters that they are open to exchange links (called reciprocal links) with suitable sites.

The above method is the correct method of getting other webmasters to link to your site. I like to refer to is as the straight and narrow road - Not always easy and certainly time-consuming but the best method.

The second method that webmasters often use to get other sites to link to them is to visit so-called “link farms”. These sites normally place adverts like: “Get thousands of other sites to link to your site for the low price of only $ 10″, or “Exchange links now with thousands of other sites”, etc. Sounds good? Sure it does. It is the easy way. However, it is not the correct way. The intention of these sites is to mislead the search engines by creating the impression that your site is very popular. Companies like Google™ are fully aware of these “tricks”. They will know if you get your incoming links from link farms and these type of links will certainly not help your site’s credibility as far as search engines are concerned. Avoid link farms at all cost!

Please note that not all webmasters are prepared to exchange links. Some of the very popular sites receive so many requests to exchange reciprocal links that they either refuse to post any new links or insist that your site must have a certain Google™ page rank before they will consider exchanging links. Some of these sites will even charge you a monthly fee for having your link on their site. Do not get discouraged. There are many good websites that will gladly exchange links with your site at no cost.

In case you are wondering, Google™ ranks website pages from 1 up to 10, where a page rank of 10 is an indication that Google™ considers it as very important. Most website pages on the internet do not have a page rank at all. It takes time to get a page rank. It can take years to get a high page rank. There are many sites that offer a free page rank checker. I can recommend www.prchecker.info. Try to exchange links with sites that have a high page rank, at least higher than your own website’s home page. Having incoming links from “important” sites are always an advantage.

Lastly, it is easy to check how many sites are linking to your site. Once again there are many sites that offer this service for free. I can recommend www.webmaster-toolkit.com.

Do not try to convince too many sites to exchange links with your site. Take your time and do not force anything. Remember that having excellent content on your own site is the best incentive for any webmaster to link to your site. Do not make the mistake of chasing after links while neglecting the content of your site.

Francois du Toit is the owner of http://www.money-maker-advice.com, a website designed to help new entrepreneurs succeed by evaluating various online and offline business opportunities, affiliate programs and network marketing options. The website also offers free articles and tools that will assist webmasters in building profitable websites.

The 2006/07 National Basketball Association tips off Oct. 31, stirring memories of NBA betting warriors from previous hardwood campaigns.

Any bookmakers’ list of NBA betting legends would have to include “Cryin’ Kenny,” a notorious ‘under’ player who was well known around North Las Vegas sports books in the 1970s.

Kenny cried about everything and the more he drank, the more he cried. In 1976, Kenny made a tap-out wager on what turned out to be one of the most famous games in NBA history, Game 5 of the league championship series between the Boston Celtics and Phoenix Suns. Kenny didn’t stray from his usual NBA betting strategy, betting the game ‘under’ the total at the old Del Mar Race and Sportsbook.

Kenny already was counting his winnings when the game went into overtime. During the overtime, the Suns shrewdly called a time-out they didn’t have, giving the Celtics a technical foul shot but getting the ball back in time to force a second overtime. (The rule subsequently was changed). Incredibly, the game still was under the total. Then, in the waning seconds of the second extra session, Phoenix’s Garfield Heard hit a miraculous shot to send the game into a third extra session.

Talk about bad beats! It required a manipulation of the rules that no longer is possible, a shot “Heard” ’round the NBA betting world, and three overtimes for Kenny to lose his ‘under’ bet. For once, you couldn’t blame Kenny for crying.

Kenny paced up and down during the overtimes, beating a path into the already thread bare carpet at the Del Mar. When the game finally went ‘over’ the total, Kenny walked out of the Del Mar without uttering a word. Patrons accustomed to Kenny’s cries were dumbfounded; it was unprecedented for Kenny to leave the sportsbook without expressing some complaint.

What his fellow players did not know was that Kenny would be back in a few minutes, this time, packing heat. Having retrieved a handgun from his car, Kenny re-entered the Del Mar and approached the television on which he’d watched the Boston-Phoenix game. Standing no more than six feet from the TV, Kenny raised the gun, extended his arm, took dead aim at the screen, pulled the trigger…and missed. The bullet lodged in a cinder block where it remained for years, the object of countless tales and stories.

So what happened to Kenny? Did the late Bill Dark, one of Las Vegas’ most innovative bookmakers, call the police? No. Did he grab Kenny by the lapels and throw him out? No. Did he ban him from the premises? No. Dark couldn’t do any of those things. Cryin’ Kenny owed him money.

A few years after Cryin’ Kenny went bust–sometime in the mid 1980s–there was a crew operating on the Las Vegas Strip, getting down all it could on NBA totals. Two things made this NBA betting syndicate unique. First, they only bet on Detroit Pistons games. Sometimes they bet ‘over’ and sometimes they bet ‘under’ but they always risked a ton of money.

Second, they were very, very good, at one point during their three-year run winning 16-of-18 games, a streak which tested the bottom lines of many books.

After a while, word spread that the Pistons Syndicate had someone on the inside. Reportedly, it was the Detroit timekeeper, a man in a position to manipulate seconds on the end of each play to either add or subtract time from the game clock. Supposedly, the syndicate bet ‘over’ when he added time and ‘under’ when he subtracted it.

The only problem with this revelation was that it wasn’t true. Bookmakers finally proved this to themselves when they were allowed to review the tapes of several Detroit games. A lot of the bet takers timed the games themselves and found that there was no manipulation of the clock.

So how did the Pistons Syndicate do it?

It turned out there was a vast difference in the quality of the officiating back then. Some officials called a lot of fouls and the scores on those games were higher. Other officials condoned a rougher style of play and the scores on those games were lower. The Pistons Syndicate simply was getting prior knowledge of the officiating crews in Detroit and placing their bets accordingly.

That’s no longer possible. For one thing, the disparity in officiating has been all but eliminated. So, while there still may be slight differences in the interpretation of how much hand and body contact is permitted, the difference is so slight and unpredictable as to offer no NBA betting advantage.

The league also got a lot smarter. For reasons of personal security and league integrity, the NBA no longer releases the names of officials prior to games. Referees stay in hotels under assumed names and follow no prescribed travel schedule.

Alas, after the league adopted this policy, the Pistons Syndicate soon was dissolved and, like Cryin’ Kenny, quickly passed into NBA betting folklore.

By Luken Karel for http://www.thegreek.com/ . The Greek Sportsbook & Casino is host to one of the top online sportsbooks offering NBA betting: http://www.thegreek.com/ NFL betting and all other major sports. Article reproductions must include a link pointing to http://www.thegreek.com/.

Successful investing is all about balancing the potential for gain with the risk of loss. However the ideal combination for a particular investor can be tricky. Read about what factors to consider to make better decisions when selecting your investment portfolio.

Affluent investors (which are likely readers of this article) probably already understand that diversification can reduce risk. But what if you own 20 different stocks and then a bear market takes them all down? To help cushion your portfolio against that kind of risk you can diversify into different “asset classes” that may hold up in value when the stock market goes down.

This kind of portfolio diversification is called “asset allocation” because it involves allocating different percentages of your portfolio into different types of asset classes.

• Bonds, cash and real estate are all different types of asset classes that may be expected to offer some protection during a serious bear market.

This is the traditional approach to designing a portfolio mix that will help to control excess volatility; and it involves setting unchanging, fixed allocations in the different asset types (such as 60% in stocks, 30% in bonds and 10% in cash).

• Then there is a newer, more active style of portfolio management that involves adjusting the allocations for the different asset types as market conditions change. The active style is generally referred to as “dynamic asset allocation” or “tactical asset allocation”.

Traditional Asset Allocation — Balancing Risk and Reward

How do you design a portfolio mix in the traditional way that will maximize returns yet not expose you to more risk than you can handle? That’s the $64,000 question.

Stocks are the “growth engine.” So you want as much stock market exposure as you can handle in the form of mutual funds, index funds and diversified groupings of individual stocks. But you have to balance stocks’ higher growth potential against the risk of a “destructive storm” because the stock market has historically taken dives of as much as 40%, 50% and even 90% during bear markets.

• Since traditional asset allocation techniques are based upon a “buy and hold” approach, the trick is to decide what percentage of your portfolio should be in stocks so you get some of that growth engine working for you, but not so much that you can’t weather a destructive storm if it were to hit.

The right portfolio mix for you will be a reflection of very individual circumstances. The right mix should be consistent with your “risk tolerance”. If you could not weather a short-term portfolio loss of more than 25%, then you may not want stocks to represent any more than about 50% of your portfolio (if you assume that the next destructive storm wouldn’t be worse than a 40% to 50% drop in the market). In that event, a 50% loss in your stock market holdings would translate into a 25% hit to your overall portfolio (assuming the other half is invested in cash or money market funds).

You Can Take More Risk When You are Young

The conventional wisdom is that the younger you are, the more stock market risk you can take. The simple thinking behind this is that a younger person has many more years in which to recover from a “destructive storm” and reap the ultimate benefit of holding stocks in the long term. Clearly, a worker close to retirement could not easily recover from such a destruction of value because there isn’t enough time. By the same token, retired people may have the lowest tolerance for stock market risk since they may be living on a fixed income and can’t afford any loss of value.

• However, young people just entering the work force may have good reasons to avoid taking much risk in the early years. Just like someone approaching retirement, young workers likely have several important, near-term objectives for using their savings: (1) buying a home, (2) paying back school loans and (3) starting a family. Too much portfolio risk could be counter-productive.

At the other end of the age scale, retired people may need to introduce more stock market exposure into their portfolios to have some growth potential that can offset rising expenses during their increasingly longer lifetimes. The rising costs of medical care, combined with the general rate of inflation can do serious damage to a fixed income over 15, 20 or 30 years … and that’s how long many retirees can expect to live.

What to Watch Out For

Deciding upon the right portfolio mix for your particular situation is a delicate question and should involve careful consideration of a broad range of factors. There are a number of important caveats you should understand before entering into a traditional asset allocation exercise with a broker or financial planner.

Bonds Go Down Too: Don’t be mislead that bonds never go down. There is only one instance in which the value of a bond doesn’t change … that is when you hold it to maturity and, like a Certificate of Deposit, it will return the original, face value of the bond. At any other time prior to maturity, the market value of a bond goes up or down in response to the changing level of interest rates. If you own a bond mutual fund, the market value of the fund changes daily with the movement of interest rates. A mutual fund holding long term bonds has the potential to lose as much as 10% to 20% in value during a period of steeply rising interest rates.

Online Asset Allocation Tools are … well … “Canned”: Many brokers and mutual fund companies include an online tool on their websites that you can use to generate recommended asset allocation percentages for your portfolio. These tools can be helpful as you consider the different factors in your situation and what impact each should have on your allocation decision. But many of these online tools are too simplified and may not be able to take into account certain critical factors in your own unique situation. Suffice it to say that these canned tools don’t really substitute for an in-person interview with a good financial planner or advisor.

Maximum Downside Risk Should be Considered: When you seek guidance on the right asset allocation mix for you, be aware that you can get wildly different answers from different advisors, and from different canned online tools. There are various reasons for this; but one main reason you can get very different answers from the experts is the kind of measure they use to define risk. Many advisors use statistical measures of “historical market volatility” that do not effectively take into account the maximum loss potential of a major “destructive storm”. These advisors are more likely to recommend you put a much higher percentage of your portfolio into stocks. Before accepting such a recommendation, know that the stock market has lost between 40% and 50% of its value three times in the past 35 years, most recently earlier in this decade. And of course, the Great Depression was much, much worse.

Needed: Years of Patience

If you had invested in the stock market in 1964, you would have bought in just before one of those destructive storms rolled in. This storm was a monster and you would have waited 17 years before breaking even on your investment … actually about 27 years if you take the effects of inflation into account.

The drawback of the traditional asset allocation technique is its reliance on a “buy and hold” philosophy. The method is based upon the belief that you can’t successfully time the markets … that you just have to sit tight and collect your average historical return of about 7% per year on stocks over the long run. In fact, it can be the very long term. Studies show that in many previous years, going back 100 years, investors have had to wait 20 to 40 years to actually achieve that average long-term market return.

Stepping Aside to Avoid the Destructive Storms

This painfully obvious problem with the traditional approach has fueled development of a more active investment style that seeks to avoid most of the ravages of destructive storms, when they arrive. The active approach can reduce the risk involved with holding stocks; and can allow the average investor to tolerate a higher percentage in their portfolio. So if the “traditional” allocation approach says you can only tolerate 40% in stocks, the “active” approach might allow you to tolerate up to 75% when the market is bullish.

But it takes timing of the markets to be successful. While the timing success of market “gurus” has long been suspect, the reputation of market timing has grown steadily among sophisticated investors given the increasing reliability of computerized models that analyze a host of quantitative factors about the market.

The point of these computer models is to identify longer-term market trends and invest in them until the trend falls apart. A strategy for actively changing the asset allocation of a portfolio can be driven by this kind of market timing analysis. For example, such a dynamic strategy would have had you heavily invested in stocks during most of the 1990’s while the bull market was raging. Then it would have moved your portfolio out of stocks and into something else in 2000 after the market peaked and a new stock market downtrend became evident … thereby avoiding most of the damage suffered by the average buy and hold investor.

Active portfolio management is now accessible to the average small investor because there are a growing number of individual investment advisors, market timing services and investment newsletters that employ these techniques with success. Some of these services can even be used to help you manage a 401k portfolio. Now you can weather the destructive storms by moving your portfolio out of their way and sitting happily on a dry dock or enjoying better weather in some other climate

ConfidentStrategies.com founder Mark Kramer has over 24 years of experience in the Financial Services industry. He was most recently a licensed Registered Representative with a predecessor firm of JP Morgan Chase. Mark intends to share his investment knowledge and model portfolios for index funds and exchange traded funds to help investors make smarter investment choices in the stock market and mutual funds. If you would like to learn more about investing in the stock market and mutual funds visit http://www.confidentstrategies.com to sign up for our free investment newsletter.

I’ve been doing business on the Internet for about 12 years now and I’ve seen the amount of information on how to make money online grow to staggering amounts. Everywhere you look there is some “guru” of this or that trying to peddle ebooks, seminars, software, and other doodads. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.

There’s so much information that confusion has set in. In the old days we cried for information, because we thought it would make us informed and wise. However, with the barrage of good information comes even more bad information. The end result is a world of confusion-especially for those trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet.

There’s a common state of being among people trying to make money on the Internet now. It’s a state of do nothingness. I’ve run across plenty of people who started out researching how to make money on the Internet-like through buying ebooks-and lost months of their life. Time flew past them and they didn’t actually build anything. Rather, they just kept reading and hoping from one “guru” to the next.

That state of being is really the topic of this article. It’s extremely easy, given all the information out there, to get in a cycle of chasing down how to make money on the Internet while not building anything. Here’s a free tip. You can’t make money if you haven’t built anything-service, website, ebook, whatever.

The Internet is just like the real world. Money can be made and people are making money every second of every day. Don’t waste your time glorifying what other people make. Get some facts together and start testing. The Internet is full of self-touting people who show off checks they have made. Here’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter what they are making-unless they are giving you a cut.

There are billions of dollars being made through the Internet each year. Stop asking if people are making money and start building up your own business. Good luck.

Jason Martin runs a travel portal at http://TourismJunction.com. The site also features travel news.

Often times when consulting with small businesses, I’m asked “where do we get started with a website, and will we be able to afford this?”

First off, you can definitely afford to have a website (most web designers charge in the neighborhood of $70-100/page for fairly basic pages), and I’d argue you can’t afford NOT to have a website for your small business. Many potential customers today prefer to research companies and shop via the web, and the boundaries to the audience you can reach is limited only by your imagination. Let’s look at how you get started.

Initially, you’re going to want to reserve a unique domain name (as in www.yourdomainname.com). Try to think of a name or phrase that is easy to remember. If you can get one to match your company name, that’s best. If not, think of a search term someone might use to find the company. For my company, “consulting services” would be a popular search phrase so including the word “consulting” in the name was a key. Don’t over-think this-keep it simple, and don’t get too cute or fancy with the name.

There are several places you can search for an available domain name including:

• Go Daddy
• Register.com
• Domains.org

Most domain registrars charge less than $10/year per site name, and their sites do a good job of stepping you through the process if you’re a beginner. If you come across a registrar wishing to charge you too much, shop around-there’s a lot of solid competition in this arena.

Ok. Now you have your domain name picked out and registered, but what good is it to have a web presence if nobody can find you? Immediately submit your domain name to the major search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. The reason behind this is it takes several weeks to months for them to “crawl” (inventory) your site. That means you have a little time to get the content for your site developed. Most conventional wisdom suggests developing the content, then submitting to the search engines, but you’ll be ahead in the game if you submit to the engines right away.

To submit to the major engines, go to their websites and look for a link that says something along the lines of “suggest a site” or “suggest a link.” Then follow the links to submit a site for free. You’ll have to answer a few questions, but you’ll be well on your way to helping others find you which is the whole reason you’re wanting a web presence right?

Next, it’s time to develop some content. I’d highly recommend hiring a professional to create an appealing and functional site. Most beginning websites done by inexperienced developers tend to lack good navigation, institute poor layouts, and have unappealing aesthetics. Your site doesn’t have to be complicated to be appealing and functional. If you wish to develop the main content yourself, have a developer create some template pages complete with basic linking for you to obtain a consistent look and feel for your site. There’s nothing wrong with paying for a site shell and tweaking that shell over time. In fact, that’s how most sites are started. Don’t expect a web designer to write your website copy for you-you know the most about your company so you’ll want to drive the bus for that.

Once the content is developed and laid out to your liking, where are you going to put it? Most small businesses don’t have the resources to host and support a site internally so that means finding a web-hosting partner. There are tons of web hosting companies out there (do a Google search for web-hosting and select one that appeals to you), but you’re going to want to find one that is reliable, provides quality 24/7 customer service, and instructs you how to upload and update your content. The web-hosting company does not have to be local to serve your web pages. If you require internet e-mail addresses for your employees, it might benefit you to find a package that includes a certain number of e-mail addresses with the package. These are rather common. Some other whistles and bells you may want to have included: script handling, database integration, shopping carts, and visitor statistics. The latter is rather important to see how your site is doing and which pages your visitors seem to migrate to the most. You’d pay attention to your visitors if they physically came into your company or store so your website shouldn’t be any different.

Voila! You have the very basics of gaining a web presence. Now you’re ready to start tackling ways you can optimize your site content along with gaining new visitors and retaining them.

Roger Bauer is Founder and CEO of SMB Consulting, Inc., a Louisville, Kentucky based small business consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, web presence, internet marketing, SEO, technology, and business analysis. To learn more, point your browser to http://smbconsultinginc.com.

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