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"Planning to succeed" isn't just a philosophy. You need to plan for your business success! You need the popular Mind Your Own Business e-port. It'll save you time. It'll save you money. And it just might save your asterisk.

Do you know how to protect your intellectual property? You need Copyrights and Wrongs — Protecting Your Intellectual Property, an e-port written especially so speakers, trainers, and other "information entrepreneurs" can protect their most valuable asset.

The Future
of Search Engines?

Search engines are arguably the most utilized computer application today. And although they use different algorithms in conducting their searches, the major search engines — Google, Ask, Yahoo, and so on — all work fundamentally the same way. You, the searcher, type in a word or phrase, and the search engine provides you with a list of the web pages that most closely match what the general population means when they type that particular word or phrase.

Sometimes that causes problems. As professional speakers, we see this all the time. When someone (such as a meeting planner) searches for a "speaker", they are likely confronted with a huge list of matches... many of which are for stereo speakers.

But what can we do? Search engines can't figure out what you mean, can they?

Fortunately, search engines can't read your mind. Yet. But "community trained" search engines are starting to appear, and they just might turn traditional searching on its head.

Check this out! It's a search engine especially "trained" for professional speakers. Don't believe it? Type "NSA" into this Swicki, and compare it to what Google gives you!

How does this relate to you? As an expert in your field, lots!

Let's say you speak on "networking". You'd obviously like to attract people to your website who are also interested in networking.

These people have a problem. Whenever they type "networking" into a search engine, they are faced with thousands of sites on computer networking, network marketing, networking with people... only a few of which interest them.

They have a problem, and you have a solution. All you need to do is add to your website a "trainable" search engine like this one, but trained to recognize the terms and phrases that are important to your market!

To get your own Swiki like the one above, just go to swicki.eurekster.com. Just follow their easy directions, install it on your blog or website, and you and your customers can start "training" it. It's fun!

And you just might be a pioneer in the future of search engine technology.

  Jim Barber