| Coastal Post Online
In 2001, my longtime dream of owning a community-serving business was realized when, without any retail or bookselling experience, I purchased the Brown Study Bookshop, a sleepy used-book store in Point Reyes Station. I soon came to learn the realities of owning a small independent business in an age when consumers, seeking the best deal, are drawn to purchasing goods online and in big-box stores.
The last two decades have brought sweeping changes in many American communities as strip malls, big-box retailers, and e-commerce replace the locally owned shops on Main Street. Nationally, the number of independent bookstores alone has fallen from 4,700 in 1993 to 2,500 today, as revenues from Internet book sales climbed from $2.6 billion in 2002 to $4 billion in 2006. Describing the mega-corporate takeover in The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, David Korten writes, "unlike the owners of locally based businesses, the absentee shareholder owners of these new businesses have little knowledge or concern for the consequences at the local level for action taken on behalf of the corporation."
In contrast, a growing movement of independent businesses is creating "local living economies" and seeking a "living return"-one partially paid by the benefits of living and working in healthy, vibrant communities.
Gadgets Notebooks Outnumber Desktops in the Consumer Sector
The writing has been on the wall for years concerning the rise of the notebook computer. Notebooks were once relegated to business professionals and the upwardly mobile types that didn't mind paying $1,000 USD or more to "cut the cord." However, Intel's Centrino campaign coupled with lower component prices have allowed the notebook market to blossom. Society's craving for wireless Internet access anywhere and a shrinking performance gap between desktops and notebooks have finally allowed the former to rise to the top in consumer PC sales. Notebooks for the first time outsold desktops during 2007 for the consumer market. Online retailer Amazon.com reinforced the dominance of the notebook with its sales stats for the holiday season – 16 of its top-selling PCs during the holiday season were notebooks.
Top marketers held at GUN POINT and forced to make $1,000 in 48hrs.
Thats the exact scenario put before a few top Internet Marketers. With such a motivating challenge they "spilled the beans" about there top secrets for generating insane sales on the internet. All the marketers were asked to document what they did and how they did it on screen shot videos as they placed ads and used various web 2.0 venues to put out the message about the product they were asked to sale. Why would you put forth such a challenge and document it, you ask. Simple to show anyone considering starting or developing a home business that its not as hard as so many people make it out to be. With the right education, training and mentoring you can use an unlimited amount of available tools to promote and successfully build an online business with tools other than Google.
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