@ t E c H n O p R e N e U r

I was never fond of geometry. I have to thank my Math teacher for that. He made learning math utterly painful, ‘fingernails dragging across the board’ painful.

Maybe it had to do with my father being a math wiz as well. Frustrated my dad constantly because of my inability to understand mathematical concepts and instantly applying them to solve complex problems. I was never ever going to be Charlie Eppes of fame, so why not just rebel against gaining math intelligence at the peril of being tagged a mathematical imbecile?

Now as a self-aspiring entrepreneur, I may come to regret my early decisions in life. Especially when the world’s highest paid marketing consultant talks about geometry in business. You may know this guy.

He goes by the name of .
Smart fellow, this man. Knows a helluva lot about multiplying a business’s bottom line.

His success rate as a marketing consultant is second to none. If you’re already planning to hire him, I suggest you stop reading my blog now, and I wish you the best for your early retirement and enjoy your sail for the Bahamas in your 25 million dollar yacht.
For the rest of us who can’t afford to hire Jay Abraham (for the moment at least), well, you’ve got me to dish out a few nuggets of business wisdom from the man himself.

You see, Jay Abraham is all about working on the geometry of a business, as opposed to growing a business incrementally. That’s how most businesses grow their business, incrementally, or in a linear fashion, which is burdensome.
The geometry of business speeds up growth as much as 90% (I’m not making that up) and here’s why.

There are only three major ways to grow a business.
At this point, I’m going to let him do the talkin’: 
If you’d take a moment to get a piece of paper and a pencil or pen, put the paper the long way, horizontally, and draw four boxes across and four boxes down. On top of the first four boxes across, write above the first box “Number Of Clients (Or Buyers),” the next box to the right, “Size Of Sale (Or Transaction),” the next box, “Frequency Of Transaction,” and the last box, “Total Revenue.

” Then fill the boxes in with a hypothetical example. Say you had a business that had 1,000 clients who were buying twice a year and spending $100 every time they bought. Then the revenue or the sales of that business would be 1,000 transactions, times two, times $100, or $200,000.

   
Increasing those three numbers by a mere 10% is a piece of cake, because the odds are exceedingly low that anybody is using the very best selling/marketing activities, time or efforts to attract and close buyers. Now, underneath the 1,000, put a 10% increase, or 11,000. If you only got the $100 sale up a mere 10% to $110… You can do that by upgrading into a higher quality.

You can do it by addingsome product or service. If you only increased the frequency that they came back and if you have nothing else to sell them, you could acquire or joint venture things that were valuable extensions that you could easily acquire or you got them to refer more people… If you increased all those numbers by 10%, the total would not be 10% more. It would be a full 33 1/3 % increase.

If you increase those numbers across the board by 25%, I don’t want to reallyboggle people’s minds, but the impact would be almost a 400% growth in the business. If you doubled all those figures, it would be 800%. That’s how you really get powerful growth.

 
(Source: Mark Victor Hansen Interview featuring Jay Abraham, Jan 18 2006)
I told you the guy was smart. You can get hold of the interview (it’s a pdf file so you will need the to open it).
That’s about it for today’s geometry lesson but I do have something else to share with you - Traffic, human traffic to be specific.

Human traffic is something that every business owner craves for and as mentioned earlier, this is one of three ways to grow a business. Each visitor to your business site is a potential buyer or client. You will have to convert your traffic into buyers or clients to grow your business.

And to do this effectively, you must understand the importance of .
I’ve seen too many businesses that setup shop online only to fall by the way side because they’d failed to keep tabs on measuring their web site metrics. Only by measuring your web metrics, can you explode your business growth geometrically, as how Jay Abraham described it.

Measuring metrics is more science than art and can be a real pain in the gluteus maximus if you re not sure of what to keep track of. But it can be the difference between zero growth, or a 200 % growth in your business.
In a future post, I will reveal the most important metric you should probably be keeping your eye on right now.

And don’t feel shy about sharing your thoughts and ideas about growing a business in the comments area below. We could all learn something from one another.
P.

S. if you re planning on switching to Microsoft Vista when it hits the shelves next year, you might wanna check your PC s hardware compatibility. To do so, click on the logo.

There are very few companies on planet Earth that can truly say they deserve ‘a second’ of our dwindling attention span. Microsoft and Apple are two such companies that fall into this exclusive group. And when you find these two corporate giants going head-to-head for market-share, it’s time to sit-up and pay attention.

Apple got a head start in this market with the launch of the . Yes, MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, known better as , has changed the way we listen to music today and spawned an industry that has put you, the consumer, in charge.
Listening to an MP3 file is as easy as switching on your radio or, clicking a file on your PC or Mac.

It’s this ease that has made MP3 a very popular format for consumers like us. But what Apple realized was, humans are actually creatures in constant motion and would never settle for sitting in one spot listening to music or a motivational tape. Their ‘light bulb’ moment led to the launch of a portable MP3 device called the iPod (though, credit has to be given to Sony for introducing this concept with its release of the Walkman).

Today, the iPod has become a fashion statement for the young and trendy. If you don’t find it hanging round their necks as an accessory, you know it s probably stashed away in their pockets somewhere.
Microsoft, who bore witness to Apple’s great strides in this market, plotted covetously for a piece of this pie; like Gargamel preying on the Smurfs.

– the latest offering by Microsoft is its ‘in-your-face’ reply to Apple. Or is it?
You see, the purpose of the long-winded introduction is to bring your attention to a burgeoning trend, known more familiarly as .

predicted that podcasting will reach an audience of more than 56 million by the year 2010; this, within the U.S. alone.

That’s like shooting fish in a barrel for advertisers. Apple foresaw this and quickly cornered the market with the iPod, so much so that the term podcasting has become synonymous with the iPod (podcasting =  iPod + broadcasting). This has much to do with Apple’s astute foresight, as it has to do with its brilliant marketing.

Microsoft’s Zune (to be launched tomorrow) on the other hand, seems only capable of playing catch-up.  Because I’m not the sort who is overly concerned with looks (hence my taste in most things audio), hardware design is rarely a point of contention for me. What piques my interest in technology-based products is the ability to sustain current and future trends.

Zune does not even come close in this aspect. You’ll understand why if you read .
A podcast, usually in MP3 format, is audio content that you can listen to on your Mac or PC or any portable MP3 player at your convenience.

I say convenience because unlike radio, you determine what you want to listen to, how you want to listen to it, and above all, when you want to listen to it. This is made possible with a little help from (a terminology you should already be well familiar with). Like a , where an aggregator fetches blog content that you specifically requested for -  by placing individual RSS feeds into it -  hence giving you the ability to read the content at your leisure at one location, a podcast works in exactly the same way.

The only difference - you re now listening to content instead of reading it. Groovy!
The easiest method is as simple as visiting the podcaster s website and listening to it there ( most podcasters offer the option of downloading an MP3 file directly to your computer).

Alternatively, and the best method of course is to get hold of an aggregator (also known as a podcatcher)  and start subscribing to your favorite podcasting feeds.
Well, it seems almost obvious for what I m about to tell you, but anyway, Apple does have a podcatcher. It s called and it s a free download for PCs as well as for Macs (goes without saying).

Visit the , download the software and read for a better grasp of getting the best out of it.
You re now ready to start subscribing to podcasts. There is a podcast about practically any topic you can think of (yes, people really do have that much time on their hands).

But if you re not one of those who has time to spare, then you ll want to separate the wheat from the chaff. You do this by visiting the more popular podcast directories like and performing searches for subjects of your choice on , and . Or, why not try searching Web 2.

0 style with . Here s how TechCrunch describes Plugged:
Here’s how this new search will work. When users decide they only want to hear a part of a file concerning a given topic, they enter a search term.

Pluggd then searches for instances of that term and related terms being used in the file. Relevance is displayed on the file timeline with a heat map, sections of the file most related to your term appear in red, less related in green and unrelated in blue. Hover over any relevant point on the timeline and you’ll see the terms used there that Pluggd determined were related to your search term.

Users can click to listen to the file at that point, or select another option to tag, describe and share a particular section of the file. Castro says the company aims to set that data free, not keep it trapped in Pluggd. All of this is being done first with audio, but the company intends to implement the same technology with video as well.

already uses speech recognition with podcasts but doesn’t offer the semantic analysis of terms related to your search query. does something similar for video, but Pluggd is building on speech recognition and adding even more value to search results.
Other podcatchers that may entice you, well, there s , which doubles as a directory of popular podcasts.

Though not technically a podcatcher, as it still requires iTunes for subscription or Yahoo s very own ,  it does come in handy for a quick glance of what piques your listening pleasure.
Just one more podcatcher that you should know; . An , Juice (formerly iPodder) is one of the more popular podcatchers around.

You ll still need your default MP3 player on your computer to listen to your subscribed podcasts. So, the choice of podcatchers is entirely up to you. Play around with them and choose the one you re most comfortable with.

Hey, This Podcasting Thingy Is Still All Gobbledygook To Me
Alrighty then, how about watching a few short albeit excellent videos that could paint a clearer picture for you? It s free and all you gotta do is click on the links below to watch them on your browser (nothing to download). These videos are courtesy of (hope you don t mind me sharing these videos with my readers, Andy), who has created an intensive course on :
I may be overdoing it here but, how about a short demo on subscribing to a podcast from a website?

 
Ok, let’s suppose you’re a news junkie. Reading the newspaper ain’t enough of a fix for you. You need something stronger.

Radio might not cut it because to get the information you want, you re at the mercy of the station’s programming schedule, not forgetting the advertisements you ve to sit through. Or the DJ/host/presenter/news anchor just talks too much! Same goes for television.

Here s where podcasts can come in. Go to , U.S.

edition (just one of many news sites that offer podcasts). Look for the podcast subscription s link or logo (scroll down a little and you ll find it).
For the International edition, you can find the subscription link right at the bottom right corner of the web site.

When you find something you like, click on either the iTunes   logo,  (this launches the feed directly into your iTunes) or, the subscribe pod  logo  .
The rest is as easy as finding your podcatcher logo, clicking on that logo and you re done.
If the podcast happens to carry ads, try using the forward button on your iPod, or whatever player you re using (that s the beauty of podcasting.

You re in control).
Of course, we ve got the whole other matter of subscribing to a videocast. But the steps are similar to that of podcasts.

So now, instead of just listening - you can listen and watch at the same time (oh right, I m sure you already knew that, with a television in your home and all hmm).  
In future posts, I ll be writing about applications for podcasting in your business. How you could be the Howard Stern of business radio and be profitable at the same time.

Like blogs, proper tactical applications of new media will lead to a massive boost in your business growth. So stay Zuned or iTuned (had to sneak that in) .