Knightscove Media Corp. Delays Filing of Audited Year End Financial Statements
May 1st, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsKnightscove Media Corp. (TSX VENTURE:KC.A)(TSX VENTURE:KC.B) (“Knightscove”) is announcing that it will be late in filing its audited annual financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2011, the related Management’s Discussion Analysis, and the CEO and Corporate Controller certification of filings (collectively, the “2011 Filings”).
The delay is caused by a couple of key factors. First, Knightscove has had a change of auditors from Grant Thornton LLP. It was mutually agreed that this was in the best interest of Knightscove and not as a result of any “Reportable…
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Everyone’s always talking about social media and how you need to get on Twitter. If you’re not on Twitter or on Facebook your business is going to suffer and you’re going to go poor. You absolutely need to leverage social media to make it big. That’s all you ever really hear.
Do you ever stop to ask, what’s the point of social media? Why do I need to be on Twitter? Is it really the end of the world if you less followers than someone else?
Is there another side to social media? Can social media ruin you? Yes it can. Allow me to share a few examples with you on how social media has cost certain individuals thousands of dollars (and their jobs!):
Miguel Torres, a fighter with the UFC lost his job with the company over a tweet. I’m not going to repost the tweet because it was inappropriate enough to get him fired, but you can read the story here. Torres’ job is to beat up other men and hurt them. Yet he got fired for saying something hurtful on Twitter. Social media hurt him more than his competitors.
Helio Castroneves (3-time Indianapolis 500 winner) was fined $30,000 when he called a director a “circus clown” on Twitter. That’s a lot of money to lose over something under 140 characters.
A girl I never met, but worked with one of my former professors had a job offer rescinded when the manager at the company found a picture of her dressing like a you-now-what, drunk at a club. It was a photo that would help you with your job application at Hooters. Not as an engineer or teacher.
I could go on with the examples. Actually, I’m sure that you guys have plenty more examples of friends that did something totally dumb on social media. You get the point by now.
I’m by no means any sort of social media expert. I’ll go as far as to say that I suck at social media. I do know a few things that you need to know about social media.
I need to share a few things about social media with you so that you don’t ruin your life, your career, or your bank account balance.
What’s your audience? What’s your audience into? I run a blog aimed at 20-somethings so I’m not too concerned about cursing or saying something rude on Twitter or Facebook. If you run a service for account professionals or coupon-clipping parents, then you can’t be getting too wild on Twitter.
You seriously don’t know who’s on the other end. If your Twitter or Facebook isn’t private than literally anyone can see what you’re writing. This is cool if you’re promoting your new eBook and want massive sales. What if you want to post a thought about one of your friends on Twitter? What if you get too drunk one night and start ranting away?
I once heard a great rule about tweeting on the radio. It mentioned that you shouldn’t tweet if you’re hungry, sad, grumpy, lonely, or drunk. You never know what you’re going to say that you’ll up regretting a few minutes later. Once that tweet goes out into the world it can easily be saved and used against you.
Long story short, watch what you say because you don’t know who’s on the other end.
I don’t get the hype of disclosing exactly where you are. I’ve mentioned the city that I’m in a few times when I was travelling through Europe, but I never gave my exact location out. You just don’t know who’s out there. What if you made some enemies? What if someone is out to get you? Why even bother giving your exact location out unless you’re planning some sort of a meet up?
When you post a picture on Facebook or Twitter, ask yourself: would I want this on a billboard? Once you throw something out there to the world, everyone will have access to it. I’ve personally put up way too many pictures from parties on Facebook. One day my great grandkids are going to find a picture of me cross-eyed in a bar (with beautiful women of course). When I think about it, it’s pretty scary to know how many pictures we all have out there. We don’t know who’s going to have access to what what say, do, and post today, in the future.
What’s the point of this article? Don’t be a clown. Watch what you do on social media. It’s not where you are right now. It’s all about where you want to be. Think of the scandal that would come up if pictures of you passed on on the floor surfaced if you decided to run for politics.
View full post on The Financial Blogger
HealthGrades and CPM to Merge; Combination Creates Unique Digital Media Platform
November 5th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsHealthGrades, the leading provider of information to help consumers make an informed decision about a physician or hospital and CPM, the leading provider of customer relationship management solutions for hospitals today announced a definitive agreement to merge the two companies.
The combination will create a single online company with more than 200 million annual visitors, providing consumers the ability to find, select and connect with physicians and hospitals by accessing its comprehensive information about clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and patient safety.
Together the companies will provide hospitals with an efficient and accountable digital media and relationship management platform with the unique…
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Media Advisory: London Housing Outlook Seminar “The Numbers Behind the Stories”
October 28th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsMedia are invited to attend Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s London Housing Outlook Seminar. This annual event is an important forum to hear the latest housing market trends, forecasts and analysis for London.
This year’s theme, “The Numbers Behind the Stories” will examine where the London housing market is heading and what challenges lie ahead.
CMHC’s Housing Outlook sessions offer access to the most extensive housing research network in Canada.
For event details, visit www.cmhc.ca/conferenceregistration (http://www.cmhc.ca/conferenceregistration)…
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
How To Build a Media Kit And Make More Than Other Bloggers Or How To Sell Better
October 25th, 2011 | Posted by Global Investors
Following up on yesterday’s post on how to build a Media Kit, I’m going a little bit deeper with you and will look at the details that any entrepreneur should look at before talking to any potential advertiser/client. Here again, I’m taking my online business as an example but you can definitely apply any of these tips to other businesses or side lines. In fact, you can also apply what you learn here to yourself and prepare to get a better salary raise at work! This is not a “how to build a media kit for blogs” article but more “how to build a promotional kit for anything… including how to sell yourself!”.
The very first thing you want to establish in your media kit is credibility. This can be quite easy to earn if you have some proof to show your advertisers. In the blogging world, here are some questions you can answer upfront in your media kit that will help you gain credibility:
How long have you been blogging?
What is your monthly traffic?
Are you on an up trend in terms of stats?
Are you part of any groups? (like the Yakezie, Seeking Alpha certified, etc.)
What are your RSS readers, twitter followers or Facebook fan stats?
Have you been mentioned on any important blogs, magazines, newspapers or major sites?
You can also put together some stats that will tell your advertisers that you have a good blog (Page Rank by Google or Alexa Rank by Alexa)
If you want to go a little bit deeper and look more professional, you can also add demographics. You can easily get free stats from Alexa, Quantcast and Google Analytics.
As you can see, the first page of your media kit should include your unique selling proposition and some facts to back it up. This increases your chances of having the best advertiser-blog fit. Mind you, sometimes you will get great offers from clients that don’t fit your audience. It’s up to you to accept them or not. Personally, I don’t do sponsored posts for this reason, however, I don’t mind having links or banners since they are in specific sections of my sites.
The same reasoning applies to any other type of business or if you want to market yourself and get a better job (your first page of your resume should include most of what has been discuss in the first page of a media kit!).
Here’s the good news; if you have followed step #1, you are halfway done with positioning! You know what you have to offer and have facts to back up your sales pitch. Now it’s time to know what you want and don’t want.
You can play the Nascar blogger or you can be very selective with the type and number of ads. As you can see, I’m trying to slowly diminish the number of Ads on TFB (I’ve already taken off Adsense within posts and took off all ads above the fold). This is because I want my readers to:
a) Read my articles without being distracted by an ad (and worse, clicking on it to leave my page!)
b) Subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed
I think it is more valuable to keep my readers for a while instead of making a quick buck off them. Mind you, I don’t manage all my sites this way. Some others are made so I can optimize short term money from them. These are all questions you need to ask yourself in order to position your site and yourself as an author or entrepreneur.
Does it mean that you endorse everything you publish on your blog? This is a well debated topic as there are ethical questions to ask yourself. In my opinion, if you publish private ads in your sidebar, your readers should be smart enough to know that these are not your products and not your companies. Therefore, they should know that this is advertising. However, whatever you write about, you should tell them if it’s paid or not. This is where I draw the ethical line on my sites.
You want to make money advertising? Well duh, let them know that you exist! As opposed to many other companies, marketing your blog can be pretty cheap. All you need is usually an advertising page along with a contact form. Make sure that both pages are visible and on the top of your site. This is usually where advertisers will look to contact the blogger.
Okay, now is the time for you to laugh at me! If you look at the TFB Advertising page, I can tell you that I see 2 big problems with it:
- It’s very bad (not much info, short and no incentive for advertisers to do business with me)
- It’s very old (I don’t do reviews any more, my PR is 4, my RSS and traffic stats are outdated… man I really need to update this!)
So what’s to learn from a page like this? When it’s been a while that you have been in business, you forget some important stuff. But since you have been there for a while, you still get clients anyways! Lol! I’ll update my page soon!
However, I don’t always do bad things 
Here’s my The Dividend Guy Blog Advertising page. This one is very professional and includes packages that advertisers can pick without me talking to them (if they fill in the form, I get the money via Paypal and the link info at the same time). I usually get one request a day from this page. But because I charge a lot, most advertisers drop the ball as they want me to publish their ads for nothing… This is when we get to the last point…
If you don’t like negotiating, don’t get into business… or have someone do this part for you! However, there are some tricks to overcome time consuming negotiating and get to an agreement much faster: craft your unique selling proposition and have a solid media kit. I can see my ad management evolving into 3 stages over time:
Stage #1: Take everything – the Nascar approach
At first, all I wanted to do is make money out of my blog (I bet you are like me ). I accepted almost any type of advertising (sponsored posts, reviews, banners, links, etc) and at any price (basically anything I could get from the advertiser with a minimum of negotiation). This was great as I was making money but I was losing in quality and opportunities at the same time.
Stage #2: Negotiate every single deal
After a year or so, I realized that I could negotiate better deal with my advertisers by offering them long term deals (I give a rebate for 6 month or 12 month deals) or by offering ad space on more than one blog (the advantage of running a multiple blog business). However, I was negotiating every single deal, going back and forth a few times and trying to earn the most for my efforts every time. While I was making a lot more money than with the Nascar approach, I was spending a lot of time on my email.
Stage #3: Act like a businessman
Now, I don’t spend much time on negotiating or finding advertisers. I actually give them my rate sheet along with my media kit and tell them that if they want a rebate, they just have to take a long term deal or sign for more than 3 links. No negotiation if you only want 1 link on a monthly basis. This saves me a lot of time and I’m making even more money. Serious advertisers will recognize professionalism and appreciate the long history of my blogs. They know that I’ll be around next year to renew their commitment and that the quality of the blog will remain intact. If they think I’m too expensive, then I know it’s not the right client for me. This is true for any business: once you have positioned yourself, don’t bargain away your soul. If you are a Rolex, you can’t get Wal-Mart’s clients (or very few of them!).
In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be sharing with you my rate sheet and media kit through my newsletter. I’ll also discuss how to price your blog (with real $ you can make and not some “I ask $100 per month” BS). Anything else you want me to include in this future newsletter article?
View full post on The Financial Blogger
Media Advisory/Interview Opportunity-BMO: Small Business Owners Selling Themselves Short To Fund Ret
October 24th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsAccording to a study by BMO Financial Group, the majority of small business owners are planning to fund their retirement through the sale of their business and often face challenges when saving for retirement. The study found that:
Fifty-one per cent indicated that they plan to use the sale of their business to fund their retirement.
Forty-nine per cent admitted…
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
How To Build a Media Kit And Make A Killing With Private Advertisers
October 24th, 2011 | Posted by Global Investors
Following up on several of your requests after my blog income report, I decided to create this series to show you how I manage my private advertising on all of my sites. I’m not going to address publishing text links or not, nor how sponsored posts can be perceived by your audience. Nor if writing paid reviews is a cool thing or will they just upset your readers. I’ll leave these debates for others. In this series, I’ll only focus on how to make as much money as possible with your blog. How cool is that?
For those who are not interested in selling private advertisements, don’t worry, what I write on this blog can be applied to any business model. In fact, this will be a great help for any of you who want to build your business (regardless if it’s online or not). You can also learn from this series if you want to present your side business, a product or service to any clients. The same principles will apply. Plus, I’ll be providing more “technical” stuff to newsletter subscribers to not bore the rest of you on this blog ;-D.
So, if you know that you want to attract private advertisers and make money out of it, here’s what you will learn in this series:
- Make serious money with private advertisers
- Build your media kit that will earn you thousands of dollars
- Save time by managing your links properly
- Run multiple blogs with very low fees (newsletter subscribers only)
- Get the very same media kit template I use (newsletter subscribers only)
So the first step before you sell your first ad space is to know what you have to offer, right? You can’t simply go “all-in” and build a media kit in a hurry. Sorry folks, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
This is a simple question that usually comes with a quick answer. However, the answer is often wrong as we don’t take enough time to consider what our blog/company/service really is. If you don’t agree with the word “wrong” as you think you are “right”, let’s use “a good answer but often not enough to impress your public”. If you had to explain what you are offering in 2 lines, would you be able to do it? Here’s mine for The Financial Blogger:
My blog is about how to work less and make more money
That relates to my tag line “working 4 days a week, making 6 figure income”. This is what I offer on TFB. This is what we call a Unique Selling Proposition. I won’t go into the concept of USP (Corbett Barr already did it better than I can right here) but the point is to tell the world, in 2 lines max, what is so different from your blog/company/service.
Here are some examples that are not too great:
I’m providing great content on blah blah blah (we all think we provide great content and there are tons of blogs writing about so and so).
I’m THE reference in this topic (you are probably not and even if you are, what makes you so unique, maybe I can claim the same thing on my blog and that will make 2 experts in the same niche!).
I tell people how to … save money/live frugal/invest wisely/etc. etc. etc. (there are tons of “how to” blogs… not really original, right?).
So What Makes You Original? (hint, the answer is in the question )
You got it: YOU! You are unique, you are different and you are the writer on your blog, the manager of your company and the inventor of your product. Now, you have to find a way to describe you and what you do in 2 lines… ooops getting more complicated!
I came up with my tag line (working 4 days a week, making 6 figure income) because it combines 2 of my biggest strengths as an individual, as an employee and as an entrepreneur:
1) I’m damn efficient
2) I’m good at making more money
In my opinion, this is what I do best and this is why I share my thoughts about these topics on this blog. Most people in the PF blogging world know TFB as “the guy who runs all those PF sites”. I decided to keep this tag and go toward that direction.
So what defines YOU?
If you want to have something very original to offer, start by defining your strengths and how you transfer them into your blog/company.
Once you have defined what your blog is, you need to define what your audience is. Not the one you have right now but the one you want to have. There is a fatal truth about any blog or company: you can’t reach everybody. Some people will like you, others will hate you and a wide majority will ignore you (because they just don’t care about what you have to say). What you need to do is to concentrate on people that will like you; this is your real audience.
Your audience will follow you because they like what you do and what you have to say. This is the same thing if you are looking for a niche market for your business: be VERY specific. Know exactly who you want to reach and forget about the rest (they will ignore you anyways ).
I want the TFB audience to be people interested in working hard, being creative, making more money in order to have more free time. Age and sex doesn’t really matter. I’ve realized that most people reading this blog are male, between 25 and 45 which makes sense since I’m a 30 year old dude. However, I also attract older readers and women too. This is because I focus more about what I like as opposed to what I am. If you like working less and making more money at the same time, we already have 2 things in common .
This is the same thing with potential advertisers? Do you want to advertise payday loans? Do you care about the products/services sold by the advertisers? Or are you just like me and think that your readers are smart enough to judge the difference between a good product and a bad one. You can just publish advertising without endorsing it (this is why I don’t publish sponsored posts and I don’t write reviews anymore; because I offer advertising space, not endorsement possibilities). I’ve created specific sections on my blogs where I offer advertising space. Both the advertiser and the reader know that this is not stuff coming from TFB but stuff that is being advertised. It’s always important to be clear about that too .
Knowing what you want to offer and how you define it is only the first step. Once you have found it, it is important to take action and make sure your site/company reflects the image you want to portray. This is why I changed my header, added my tag line, took off my adsense block within posts and put my newsletter in the “above the fold” section while lowering my advertising sections. More recently (since the beginning of October), I’ve changed the length of my posts (more like 1,000 words now) and I’m trying to write more “useful” stuff for you. I hope it shows and that you like the recent changes on TFB!
Have you looked at your blog recently? Does it reflect what you want? Does it clearly display your message, your Unique Selling Proposition? If not, this is the very first step you need to accomplish before going further.
If you have recently made changes, or are about to do so, let me know. I want to know if your actions create results.
View full post on The Financial Blogger
Media Made for You Adds Horne Kia to Its Roster of Companies Seeking Small Business Marketing Option
October 11th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsCompany Offers Small Business Marketing Solutions Through Digital
Signage, Custom TV Channels. Tempe-based Media Made for You offers a
small business marketing solution that markets businesses to their
customers through custom TV channels that entertain, educate and engage
customers.
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Media Advisory – TD Bank Group to release third-quarter financial results
August 14th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsTD Bank Group (TD or the Bank) will
release its third-quarter financial results and host an earnings
conference call on Thursday, September 1, 2011.
Financial results will be issued in a press release at approximately
6:30 a.m. ET. The call will be webcast live via TD’s website at 3:00
p.m. ET and is expected to last about 60 minutes. The call and webcast
will feature presentations by TD executives on the Bank’s financial
results for the third quarter, followed by a question-and-answer period
with analysts.
The presentation material referenced during the call will be available
on the TD…
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Social Media Does Matter… Time To Call Out My Partner
July 26th, 2011 | Posted by Global Investors
Mike is an incredible partner, no doubt about it. But like everyone, sometimes he can be way off. Earlier this month, while reading his June earnings post, I got stuck when he wrote:
“To be honest, I don’t believe in social media promotion. They are good for increasing the number of backlinks but people coming from social media rarely stick around. Most of them jump from one site to another without reading much”
Am I surprised by Mike’s statement? Of course not. He has told me this over and over. However, up until now, he had kept this to himself. Now that he’s discussed this publicly, I’d love to hear your thoughts. To be fair, I think Mike was speaking specifically about StumbleUpon. If you have any type of website, you know that when a post starts getting stumbled, you can see visitors running into the website. The problem of course is that they leave with the same speed in almost all cases. You’d have to see the average time spent on our sites for StumbleUpon visitors… to say that they only stay a few seconds would be an understatement. That being said, I would draw two conclusions:
I think that some things can be done with SU traffic and perhaps with a better design, that would help new visitors quickly (very quickly!) figure out how to use TheFinancialBlogger, I’m certain that at least a few of those could become regular readers. A minority? Absolutely, but at least some of them. These users would also be ones that tend to share what they like, be social about their favorite links, etc. I see clear value in that.
It would be crazy to judge Facebook, Twitter and others as if they were the same as StumbleUpon. They are clearly nothing like StumbleUpon. I think Mike has got it wrong on social media however. To be fair, he is fairly active on Twitter and has been gaining a following. I think he keeps doing it because to some degree he doubts that social media is useless. And these doubts are well founded.
In my opinion, social media will be a growing part of TheFinancialBlogger. As the blog evolves, TFB is becoming a strong brand. Interacting with fans on Twitter, Facebook, and maybe eventually an iTunes podcast or YouTube video will only help make the brand even stronger. In the end, I don’t think it’s about seeing how many users are directly referred to TFB from these services. If users find out about TFB through these alternative ways, that will increase our presence, our influence, help us reach and help more visitors and eventually that will translate into revenues and profit.
I understand that it’s much more difficult to measure how someone who is following TFB on Twitter will have more interaction with us. This is so, especially when you compare it with SEO for example, which is so easy to measure (simply having Google Analytics makes it incredibly easy).
I’d love to get your thoughts on this… Am I all alone to think that Mike was way off to write that? I will eventually convince him to create a Facebook page for TFB and when I do, I hope it will give us one more example of how social media can help TFB. In the meantime, if you don’t already, please follow TFB on Twitter and share your thoughts here!
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