Kirk Taylor

Committed to Following Christ

Committed to Follow Christ

Hi, I'm Kirk Taylor, and I am committed to following Christ. My journey began before I came to my Church home. Everything changed in a single moment, ending the direction of the first forty-nine years of my life. This blog now focuses on my commitment to following Christ.

LinkedIn, A Tool for Business People

Uncategorized

Business professionals who are overlooking LinkedIn are missing a huge opportunity to work on building their business. I admit, I overlooked it myself for many years, but recently began building a stronger network and the results have been phenomenal.

I am now connecting with people that I have not connected with for some time, have been introduced to new people that are key to my future success and likewise.

Connecting with others allows you to see who they are connected to, in most cases, and often will surprise you as to how close you really are to most everyone in the country. You may even look up celebrities and find that you are as little as one link away and in LinkedIn, that usually means that the people connected really do know each other.

LinkedIn also allows you to send direct messages to your contacts, and some people that are outside of your contacts. This is helpful if you don't have their email address, while you won't be able to access it until you become friends. You can still get your message delivered.

Networking on LinkedIn has gotten even better with message activity showing in time lines. This allows others to see what you are up to and even gives you the opportunity to post your blog articles.

If you have a website, you can increase your quality score for SEO by adding it to LinkedIn. Make sure that you select “other” when filling out website links, and then put your keywords in the Title section.

LinkedIn allows you to create special groups where there is a timeline of related messages.

Some people use the calendar function in LinkedIn to invite members to participate in events. You can select you are going to attend, are tentative or not able to attend. Business functions are able to stay on your profile showing as part of your LinkedIn “Resume”.

Out of all the social networking tools, LinkedIn is quickly becoming my favorite tool to connect to the business world. It has paid off in developing new relationships and keeping me aware of mission critical events and activities.

Best of all, LinkedIn is free for most services!

Engage Serial Entrepreneurs to Get Funded

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Start-Up Entrepreneurs often make huge mistakes when starting out. They show desperation searching for money, and they let their prospect, the potential investors see the stress on their face.

The serial entrepreneur will take a step back and put the entire situation into perspective. He will debate what all the options are including changing the business strategy to make the business less costly to operate. This allows the serial entrepreneur to come from a position of strength as opposed to weakness.

Many Start-Up Entrepreneurs desperately want to be a success, but their insecurity and lack of confidence shows as lack of confidence in their product / service. You have to be able to enthusiastically sell your product / service with confidence.

If you are struggling to get capital, you may benefit from engaging an experienced serial entrepreneur with strengths in marketing and bootstrapping. The Serial entrepreneur often will be less costly then dealing with seasoned investors or venture capital firms.

Serial entrepreneurs have a passion for helping other entrepreneurs, especially first time Start-Up entrepreneurs because they have been there and done that. They know the pain that you have gone through.

The serial entrepreneur will make bold moves on your behalf, knowing how to push the envelope, while providing a fresh experience that will show investors that they are excited about the product.

In many cases, having a serial entrepreneur on board and part of the business will attract the attention of investors that would otherwise not be interested in participating. The added experience will make investors much more comfortable with the program.

Start-Up Entrepreneurs often seek more money and are willing to give up more of their company than they need to give. Working with a serial entrepreneur, before seeking investors allows you to get someone that knows when and where to push the buttons, and how to get you the most upside.

If you're just starting out, seek out serial entrepreneurs for mentors and even business partners. These people have great potential and have felt your pain.

Register Yourname.com to Build Credibility

Marketing, WordPress

Creating your website/blog with your domain(Yourname.com) will give you more credibility with your customers, investors, vendors and employees. You’re letting people know who you are, which creates a unique relationship, allowing them to trust you. By putting yourself out there, you are taking the brand of your business to a whole new level.

Using KirkTaylor.com(you will use yourname.com), I attract people who are curious as to what I am doing next. The same goes for new entrepreneurs as their friends want to keep up with what is happening in their life. Friends, family and fans will tell others when you put more detail into your site. You can’t help but become famous online if you just are willing to put yourself out there.

I have had my domain since 2000; however, I never really used it until recently. The reason is that I didn’t want to be the brand. Now, I am quickly finding out that was a huge mistake. I would struggle to establish credibility with my old sites. When people would visit they would often leave on the first page, but now, unbelievably, my bounce rate is running at less than 4/100’s of a percent! My writing is consistent with other content while adding the personal relationship. You can accomplish what you want using yourname.com in your website.

My other domains do not index as well, and now I have more credibility and a higher rank using KirkTaylor.com.

The offline marketing is easier as well when you can tell people that your name is your site. They won’t forget and are more likely to visit. They want to know more about you.

By now you should be ready to get “yourname.com” and register it now. I highly recommend using Namecheap.com to register your domain. The customer service has been fantastic, and once you get the hang of it, managing the domain is easy as well.

Before you do register your name, keep in mind that I am going to recommend a different web hosting company. You don’t need to buy email accounts, or hosting services from Go Daddy as we will be setting up your blog site elsewhere.

How to register yourname.com

To register the domain, click on Go Daddy and you will go to the front page where you can enter your name in the search box located in the upper right-hand corner. You will get either a result that your name is available or has already been secured by someone else. In the event it has been taken, there will be other suggestions to use different variations of your name.

For now, don’t be too picky, and select one that is as simple as possible. It is more important to take action and get on to the next step. If we need to, we can come back and review different variations of yourname.com later on, but we have to have a domain name before moving forward.

Once you have found an available domain, you will need to follow the checkout process which is fairly self-explanatory especially if you can find the “skip extras and proceed to check out the link.” We just want to get your domain registered right now.

You may want to consider one feature, however, and that is private registration, which hides your email address and personal contact information in public “whois” section. You will avoid getting a ton of spam by following this process.

Go Daddy allows you to maintain 100% ownership of your domain, as long as you are current on registration fees which are negligible. You always have the option to transfer the domain, point it to a different location, or even sell it to someone else.

Would you like to have your own blog? Check out my free WordPress blog setup here.

Information Marketing is great low cost startup business

Marketing

Information Marketing is an incredible business opportunity for anyone willing to make a long-term commitment to the implementation of their Business Plan if you even bothered to create a plan.

You don't have to spend a bunch of money launching an Information Marketing business, it doesn't take much, but it does require a ton of sweat equity, something that most people aren't willing to provide.

Information Marketing requires accumulation of knowledge on a particular product or service, recording the processes involved, and then packaging those processes, offering them for sale to others, exchanging money for your hard work.

Some people do extremely well, especially if they build their personal brand around their product, which requires working social media, creating content on your blog, and even making videos on YouTube. It is a tremendous amount of work.

Information Marketing is dependent on the sales funnel that works through things like Feature, Function, Benefits. And, then there is the tie down, and trial close to see if your customer is going to buy the product. You have to put the right process in place if you expect to land any reasonable sales in your system.

And, even if you do everything right, or think you do everything right, you still are at great risk to fail this time out. But, you should never look at a failure, as a permanent failure, only a temporary setback, as it is all part of the learning process.

I've personally failed at Information Marketing, as well as many other types of businesses, before and after massive success in my life. Don't take it personally, if you fail, just start over, you'll figure it out.

Information Marketing is a great opportunity because you don't need others to launch this type of business. You can do everything yourself until you get so busy, and are making so much money that you can't afford not to hire somebody else to work with you.

I used to think that I needed someone else to work for me to make up for my shortcomings, but to be brutally honest, that hasn't worked out very well for me. Going it alone has drawbacks, but a great benefit is you are responsible for your success and failure. There is nobody else to reward or blame. You own it all the way!

All you have to do to get into this business is to become an expert at something and deliver that expertise to others through Information Marketing strategies. It's a pretty simple idea that will challenge your tenacity to come through to the end. Do you have what it takes to build an Information Marketing business?

And, if you think you aren't an expert at something, you probably aren't thinking about all the brain-dead activities that we do on a daily basis.

Brain-Dead makes for great Information Marketing material

Brain-dead stuff is the stuff that you're an expert at doing, you don't even have to think about it, but I guarantee that there are a ton of people who have to think about what you dismiss.

Try writing a blog post about things that are stupid simple, and then put detail into the topic. Change up how you would do an activity to get a different result, and chances are you are going to find a great item for Information Marketing.

Wait, you're going to do research and find hundreds, maybe thousands of people who already wrote about your area of expertise. That's fine, but before you give up, look through their material. Did they put it together the way you think is correct? Probably not, and that's opportunity.

You might even be able to leverage their material to build even better Information Marketing material for yourself. Don't plagiarize them, but utilize their ideas, and make them better by explaining how you would do the procedure better. You could even give them attribution, especially if you are a superior product or service!

Probably the toughest part of an Information Marketing business is finishing your work. You have to deliver your idea, and then get the sale, because your audience needs your product or material. Close the deal!

Information Marketing is a very personal strategy, and you need to connect with your audience. Let them know who you are, and why you are doing what you do. Help them when you can, and get people to talk about how great you are. They are your best sales people in the Information Marketing business.

Are you getting into Information Marketing? Let me know, and let's connect!

What do I need a computer for? Getting Started

Motivation

Answering the question, “What do I need a computer for?” The story about launching my online entrepreneurial career.

Back in 1995, my wife badgered me to buy a computer so that we would be able to connect to the Internet. We went round and round, and all I could say was “What do I need a computer for?” This conversation went on for months.

I finally broke down in August 1995 and purchased a computer on a Friday. I brought it home only to find out I did not have a modem to connect to the Internet through a telephone line. So, I got on the phone and called a friend who had me come over to his house and show me how to get connected. Fortunately, he had a modem that he lent me, allowing us to get online at around 7 PM.

What do I need a computer for? Connecting to AOL

We used one of the AOL disks that everyone would get in the mail and logged on to their “bulletin board” service. From there, we had an option to connect to the Internet, which I did, and started building my first website.

The idea for a website centered around creating a directory of limousine companies around the world allowing limousine businesses to network with one another.

What would I name that site? Well, I planned on linking limousine companies together, so I created LimoLink. I did not know what a domain name was at that time, so I used shared hosting on AOL, making the address http://www.aol.com/~limolink/. About a year later, I registered the domain, limolink.com and moved the entire website over to a company then known as ianet.com.

I kept on working on that site until 7 PM the next evening when I could no longer keep my eyes open. The Internet hooked me.

My site listed limousine services from all around the world. I worked on that site all the time. Plugging in every limousine company I could find. By 1997 I had typed in over 31,000 companies (I did it in HTML because I had no database experience and WordPress did not exist) and had people hitting my site from all over the world.

Everything changed on a Friday morning in 1997. I stopped in to see an investment banker friend because I wanted to ask him a personal question.

The question had nothing to do with the website, which he immediately started talking about when I entered his office.

Our conversation about the site lasted around four hours, and I never got asked the question I wanted to ask.

What do I need a computer for? Creating big business

He drew out how we could create 9 million dollars a year business on his whiteboard causing an incredible amount of excitement and anxiety at the same time.

He drew out how we could create 9 million dollars a year business on his whiteboard causing an incredible amount of excitement and anxiety at the same time.

Steve suggested that I go home and think about it over the weekend and to let him know if I wanted to pursue the opportunity. I knew right then, but I went home anyway and came back in on Monday, with the answer being a definite YES.

He showed me the way to take my obsession(hobby) and turn it into business doing 9 million a year in the nineties. Today, the company is doing several times that number. The company employs hundreds of people.

That hobby turned into a real business allowed me to seed and start several other companies since. And, I'll do more in the future.

All this, from a guy with no college degree, who barely made it out of high school. Not so bad, don't you think?

Imagine, what if I would not have bought that computer, after all, “what do I need a computer for?” I found out. I got my answer, and you will have similar questions you will ask in your life. Are you willing to take a chance as I did?

Go for it!