The footage in this video comes from our marathon shoot day a in November, when we shot footage for 3 promotional and educational videos, and the interview with Yvette. This was Yvette’s acting debut, so there were quite a few gaffs, but in the end, we got some great material, and have already gotten some great feedback on our YouTube channel.

Adjust Your Wordpress Clock For Daylight Savings Time

For my readers who use Wordpress, here is a handy tip. Wordpress uses UTC as it’s master clock. When you set up your Wordpress blog, you have to set your clock to display times relative to UTC. For instance, my clock set for UTC -8 hours. This is set according to your time zone. You can Google “Time Zones relative to UTC” to find out what setting to use for your blog.
UTC doesn’t adjust for daylight savings time, and Wordpress doesn’t do this automatically, so twice a year, you have to reset your Wordpress clock to accommodate for Daylight Savings Time.

To do this, log in to your wordpress dashboard, and click the settings button. then adjust the clock either forward or backward 1 hour to accomodate daylight savings time. In November you move it back one hour, and in May you Move it forward one hour. So if you live in California, for instance, you would change your clock from UTC – 7 hours to UTC – 8 hours, today. For great instructions, visit Heathers’ post at Wordpress.com.

Next year, Daylight Savings Time begins May 8th, and ends November 1st. I will post reminders here.
Enjoy the extra hour!

In this subscribers-only “Expert Tips” post, I will give an overview of the plugins I am currently using in my own blogs, explain how they work, and tell you how to install them on your own blog to give it power and flexibility you won’t believe. Keep in mind that although this post is specific to wordpress, most blogging software offers the use of some plugins, and while you may be using another blogging tool, you can take the suggestions in this post, and use them as a jumping-off point to search for similar plugins for your blog. Also, don’t feel constrained to using the plugins I have suggested. There are usually some great competing plugins for each of the ones I am using. For example, visit the plugin page at wordpress.org, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and search for plugins to allow you to add a Digg link to your posts. Just enter “Digg” in the search box. You will be amazed at how many plugins allow you to do this one thing. The same is true for almost all of my plugins.

While all of these plugins are available for free download at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, wherever possible, in this post, I will link to the homepage for the plugin or designer. To install them, download them from either the Wordpress.org plugins page, or the designer’s page, then unzip them and copy them into your wp-content/plugins file using an FTP program, or your webhost’s control panel, file management software. Once you have placed the plugin in your wp-content/plugins folder, log in to your Wordpress dashboard, and click the plugins button at the top right of the page. From there, follow the instructions on the page to activate and set up the plugin.

Akismet

Akismet is, without a doubt, my favorite Wordpress plugin. like most great tools, It does one thing and does it very well. Akismet is a comment spam filter.

If you have ever had to deal with comment spam, you know that it can quickly eat up your time, frustrate you, and cause you to lose faith in humanity. Before I found Akismet, I used to have to moderate approximately 200 spam comments a week. After a few times, spending 10 minutes deleting spam comments, and finding that I couldn’t even weed the spam comments out of my blog, without losing the good ones as well, I turned off the comments on my blog. I hated to lose the power of allowing comments on my blog, but I couldn’t stand the trouble that they brought.

Akismet has fixed this problem, for good. Now, I allow comments on all of my blogs, and never have to deal with comment spam. Akismet is such a great plugin, it is now included with every installation of Wordpress. I encourage you to activate it immediately when you install wordress.

Google XML Sitemaps

One of the most powerful SEO tools I have found, is Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps are XML or HTML documents that tell search engines what, and how many pages are on a website. They also tell search engines when these pages were created, and how often they are edited, and how to find them. The idea behind Sitemaps is, “why wait for search engine spiders to find pages on your site, when you can just tell them where they are”. I have found Sitemaps to be a very quick way to get ranked on Google, and like I have said before, If you can get found on Google, you can get found anywhere.

You can visit Google’s Sitemaps page here. While you are there, take a look at the rest of Google’s Webmaster tools. They are very powerful.

With small sites, it is possible to build XML and HTML sitemaps by hand. But if you have more than a few pages, or if you update your site often, it gets VERY time consuming to keep your sitemap up to date. If you regularly post to your blog, say weekly, it is nearly impossible!

This is where Google XML Sitemaps comes in. This plugin will automatically update your XML sitemap every time you update your site, then it will automatically notify Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com about the changes. Very Handy!

I Love Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites allow users to submit links to sites, pages, videos, blog posts, or other content that they like, and then, allow other users to vote on the the submitted links. Links with more votes move further up the list. While this is a somewhat obscure concept, it is simple to understand the effect of these sites. Digg is the most popular social bookmarking site, right now. If you have a blog post that gets voted to the top of Digg, you will get literally thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of hits to your site. It is not uncommon for sites to be knocked offline, due to high traffic, when they hit the front page of Digg.

In order to benefit from the HUGE amount of traffic that these sites provide, you have to actually get people to link to you (Digg you). If you have a really great site or post, they might do this manually, but it is much easier to get people to Digg you, if give them an easy way to do it, then encourage them. This is what the
“I Love Social Bookmarking” plugin does. It places a link at the bottom of every blog post that allows people to Digg that post, or submit it to any of several other social bookmarking sites, in a few easy steps. To see it in action, Purple heart and “Social Bookmarking (Digg This)” link at the bottom of this post, then DIGG THIS POST. I’d do it for you!

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically sets the proper ALT and TITLE attributes for images you put on your blog, and if you haven’t added these tags, it adds them according to criteria you set. SEO Friendly Images also validates the xHTML in the post, to W3C standards. That’s a lot of technical gibberish to say that this plugin cleans up your posts and tags images, so they are easily indexed by search engines.

Tell-a-Friend

Tell-a-Friend adds a button to the end of every blog post, that allows readers to email the post to a friend, or group of friends. To see this plugin in action, click the “SHARE THIS POST” button at the bottom of this post. In marketing, “calls to action” are very important. While you might expect that your readers, clients, or customers should know exactly what you want them to do, you can be reasonably assured that you will have a much better response, if you just ask them to do something specific. That’s what this plugin does. It asks your readers to spread the word about your great content.

Ultimate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very powerful website statistics service provided by Google. The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin adds JavaScript to each post, page, and link on your blog, that allows Google Analytics to generate statistics on what your visitors are doing while they are on your site. Additionally, Google Analytics can tell you how visitors arrived at your site (did they enter a search term in a search engine, or click on an inbound link on another site), and how they left your site (did they click on an outbound link, or did they close the window or browser).

I have found Google Analytics to be an irreplaceable tool, in that it allows me to very effectively, guage the effectiveness of certain aspects of my sites. It allows me to work to increase the “stickiness” of my site, by adding more of the features that my readers like, and it allows me to track the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns, because I can see which landing pages people are entering through, then what they are doing once they are on my site.

For anyone who is serious about conducting business on the web, I highly recommend a good statistics program, and Google Analytics is by far the best that I have used.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does just what it’s name implies. It automatically upgrades your wordpress installation to the newest version. This is a great time saver for me, because I have multiple Wordpress blogs that I manage, and manually upgrading all of them would be a real hassle.

yaCAPTCHA

yaCAPTCHA adds a CAPTCHA field to the end of forms. CAPTCHA is the technology that creates distorted text images, to ensure that the person filling out a form is an actual person. In concert with Akismet, yaCAPTCHA insures that the only comments I get on my blog, are from real people. I also use CAPTCHA technology on my subscription form. To see this plugin in action, comment on any post on this blog.

Normally, “Expert Tip” posts on www.RenegadeMarketingStrategies.com are password protected, and available only to our Subscribers. For VIP access to all of our great content, including the “Expert Tips” section, Free gifts, and other limited time promotions, Subscribe to our Newsletter.

Expert Tip

One of the most important things you can do for your business, is make sure that people find your website. This seems like a simple concept, but you wouldn’t believe how many businesses I have encountered that have a website that just doesn’t show up in search engines. Whenever I start a new consulting job, this is one of the first places I focus my attention. The web is so important for businesses, and not just eCommerce sites, or “web-centric” businesses, yet so many times this simple thing is overlooked.

If you have followed my blogs for any length of time, you have probably noticed that I post articles on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) pretty regularly. While SEO is a pretty broad term, it basically means doing things to your site to improve your Google ranking. Why do I only say Google? Because Google OWNS search. Their strategy of a simple page that delivers highly relevant results has made them the reigning king of search (Their “Don’t Be Evil” motto has helped too). And, if you are highly ranked on Google, I guarantee, your ranking on Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN, Live.com, Altavista, Dogpile, and every other search engine will be high too. When I do SEO, I just focus on Google, and let all the other search engines fall into place. I have been doing this a LONG time, I have had a lot of success with SEO, and this strategy has never failed me.

While I post basic SEO articles on the Renegade Marketing Strategies site, I usually reserve the extra-geeky ones for my personal blog, www.GarrittHampton.com, But this one was so important I had to add it here too. Please read the whole post at www.GarrittHampton.com/?p=177. I have only included a snippet here, but there are many more details, and pictures on my blog.

O.K., so here’s the tip. Use the “Publish Immediately” feature to put your blog on autopilot.

Search Engines love blogs. They love lot’s of regularly updated content, but most of us have lives, or short periods of writer’s block, that prevent us from always updating our blogs on a daily or weekly basis. Here’s where this tip comes in. When you have some free time, or a huge stroke of creativity, or if you have a long or multi-part blog post to write, sit down and write. Then, publish the first post, or the first part in a series, and set the rest of the posts or parts to be published in subsequent days. To do this, just click Edit, next to the “Publish Immediatly” area on your Wordpress “Write Post” page. This is a great way to look like you sit down religiously and write posts every day.

You don’t have to use Wordpress to use this tip. Try this with Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine, Nucleus, Pivot, b2Evolution, bBlog, Serendipity, TextPattern, or whatever blogging tools you use. Dig around a little bit, and I am sure you will find this capability. Happy Blogging!

Don’t forget to READ THE FULL POST, and see the pictures here. I go into much clearer detail on how to implement this strategy on your blog, and explain how I am using it for my own blogs. Then, to see how to take this technique to the next level, and really apply it like an expert, check out the great tip at www.webdemar.com.

BONUS CONTENT

Normally, “Expert Tip” posts on www.RenegadeMarketingStrategies.com are password protected, and available only to our Subscribers. For VIP access to all of our great content, including the “Expert Tips” section, Free gifts, and other limited time promotions, Subscribe to our Newsletter.

While this is not a topic that I suspect I will be expanding on in the future, I wanted to include it here mainly to encourage creativity in web design, and to show some of the techniques I have used in the past (not saying anything about how effective they were). I originally had three posts on this topic, but the first was so site-specific, I decided not to include it here.

One Last Babelfish Post
May 12, 2006
O.k. this is my last Babelfish post, but this is a good one. Most of us have heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), yet it is a mystery to all but the most seasoned web pro. Companies charge thousands of dollars per year to keep other companies’ web pages at the top of the search lists. Web designers and marketing people pull their hair out trying to get their websites found on Google. We hear stories of Google removing whole sites from their database. What are we supposed to do?

There is an easy way to vastly improve your search engine standings and help your site to be found. Build a great website. I know it sounds silly, but it works. If you have a great website, it will translate to better search engine ratings.

So what makes a great website? First, you have to have a lot of relevant content. If you are building a dog grooming website, have pages for contact information, techniques for handling different breeds, tools of the trade, shampoo and flea dip recomendations, a secure online store, staff bios, pictures of past clients, tips for grooming at home and anything else that is pertinent. The more relevant content you have the better. Just make sure the content is relevant. Having a page dedicated to safecracking on your dog grooming site really won’t help anything.

This is where Babelfish comes in. Once you have your site set up and looking good, start translating it. Babelfish allows you to translate whole pages of your site into 12 different languages. That means that your relevant English content becomes relevant Spanish, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Portugese, Dutch, Russian, German, Chinese and Italian content. Take the time to capture the code and post the translated pages to your web server. This will multiply your content many times, and you don’t have to spend hours and dollars creating new content.

Enjoy, Garritt

_________________________________________________

Babelfish
May 11, 2006

I recently began the monumental project of translating the Realty Response and Realty Response Connections websites into spanish. This task is complicated to begin with, but the fact that I do not speak Spanish only makes things worse. Luckily, we have a wonderfully dedicated agent on staff who speaks Spanish. Consuelo set out on the tedious process of translating the website, page by page. She was doing a great job, but it was very slow going. Then we discovered Babelfish.

Babelfish is an excellent web translation tool provided by the good people at Altavista. You can check out the very basic front end to Babelfish at http://babelfish.altavista.com. At first glance it is not very impressive, but as you use the tool, you find that it makes very tedious translations possible, whole pages at a time.

The basic user interface allows you to translate blocks of text from English into 12 other languages including Dutch, Greek, Portugese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish, . It also allows you to translate text in most of those languages back into english and to enter specialized characters for multiple languages via an onscreen keyboard. Just these capabilities make this free tool an incredible value, but there is more. By linking your website to Babelfish through a relatively simple html tag, you can allow visitors to view your site in any of those languages.

There are a few limitations to this amazing tool, but they can be pretty easily overcome. The first is that Babelfish can not translate button images. So if you use buttons on your site, they will remain unchanged. This is remedied by creating an all-text, or mostly-text page for translation. The second limitation lies with dynamic pages. Babelfish doesn’t like PHP or non UTF-8 encoding. That severly limits it’s usefulness for blogs. I have found that WordPress pages do not translate to languages that do not use the basic western character set. It will do Spanish and French on a WordPress blog, but if you want to translate your blog to Russian or Greek, good luck. Even with these limitations, Babelfish is a tool that every webdesigner should keep in his belt.

For businesses, Babelfish offers a relatively simple and inexpensive way to reach a wider audience, and even conduct web business overseas.

This bio was originally located on our “About” page, but was updated, when the Yvette’s video was added.

Enjoy.

Yvette Hampton

Welcome to Renegade Marketing Strategies. My name is Yvette Hampton and it wasn’t too long ago that I was in a desperate search for a way to make real money while being able to stay home with my daughter.

My husband Garritt and I have been married for 13-1/2 years and after many years of patiently waiting; we were finally blessed with a daughter in December of 2005.

Over the past decade we have owned three different businesses. We started out owning a recording studio and small record label, then owned a live sound company and then took a totally different direction and bought and operated a high-end stationery store in the Los Angeles area.

Our stationery store was a great business and a great success. I loved dealing with brides-to-be, new moms, and just everyday people who appreciated the art of fine stationery. However, when I found out that I was expecting our first (and very long awaited) child, I knew that I wanted to be able to stay home with her full-time, so we sold the stationery store and Garritt became a full-time, highly sought after, business and marketing consultant.

Even though Garritt was successful in his career as a business consultant, we quickly realized that the cost of living in California exceeded Garritt’s income alone. By the way, did you know that around 80% of United States households are dual-income?^1,2, and the numbers continue to grow.³ We discussed our options and both decided that I needed to find a way to make money from home while still having time to care for, nurture and raise our daughter (I don’t believe in using the TV as a babysitter). She would have to continue to be my priority so I needed something I could work on during the early morning, during her nap, or after she went to bed at night.

So began my very extensive and intense search. In the beginning, I knew that I wanted to do something using the advantages of the internet so I thought my search would be easy and quick. I would just go to one of those ‘work-from-home’ websites, pick a new ‘occupation’ and get to work. Well, that’s not at all what happened.

I found hundreds (literally) of work-from-home opportunities and just when one of them looked hopeful, I would dig a little deeper and figure out that it was a total scam. One of the main things I learned to look for was legitimate contact information. If there was no way for me to contact an actual person by email or phone, there was no way I was going to give them my money. I couldn’t afford take a chance and lose any.

One day while in the car listening to a very reputable Los Angeles radio station, I heard a commercial for a work-from-home business. I figured this company must be somewhat successful since they had money to advertise on this particular radio station, so I went to their website, gave them my contact information and was put in touch with a ‘mentor’. She emailed me information on her ‘incredible business opportunity’, a multi-level marketing business (MLM) that was in the health and wellness industry. She then set up an appointment with me “to discuss the opportunity further and answer any remaining questions”. I was excited to finally have a real life person to talk to who would answer my questions and help guide me on my way to making money.

We had our phone-appointment a few days later with her and her mentor (supposedly she was a mentor-in-training) and after they gave their pitch, I started asking questions.
I didn’t think my questions were ridiculous. The main questions I asked were: What is the total start-up cost? I wanted to know ALL the expenses I would be incurring in order to start making money…I didn’t want any hidden costs or surprises a week or month later. How long would the training process take? How much direct selling would I have to do and could I do the majority of my business online as opposed to having to sell to (and risk losing) friends and family? Would I need to store any products in my home? Is the market already saturated with this particular product? And, how long would it take before I could become a ‘mentor’ to others.

During the course of our conversation she and her mentor only answered maybe one or two questions directly and kept beating-around-the-bush as I kept trying to get straight answers from them. They just kept saying “you’ll learn about that in your training”. At the end of our conversation they were happy to inform me that they would accept my start-up charge of $250 by Visa, MasterCard or American Express. Needless to say, I was not yet ready to sign on the dotted line until I was satisfied with having my questions answered. Again, I couldn’t afford take a chance and lose any money. And it wasn’t just a matter of losing my start-up cost; it was also a matter of losing precious time and energy on a business that wasn’t going to work for my family and me.

Well, apparently my questions and lack of commitment scared her off because after that conversation, I tried to contact her again and she had no interest in communicating with me any further.

So there I was, back to square one again.

After about 6 weeks of intense research I stumbled upon the Renegade Network Marketing system . I started to read about the system with total skepticism. I’m normally a very optimistic person but after 6 exhausting weeks of frustration and disappointment I had become a total skeptic when it came to working from home. I even went as far as getting an application to become a contestant on the NBC game show “Deal or No Deal“ because I figured that I had just as good, or better, of a chance making it on the show than I had making money using the internet. (My husband got a good chuckle out of that one!)

As I started to read about the Renegade Network Marketing system I became instantly intrigued. Having been a successful business owner, I knew that the best way to succeed in any business is to have effective systems in place. Prior to the start of my work-from-home quest, I swore that I would NEVER involve myself in an MLM or ‘pyramid scheme’ as I knew them. I knew that many of the products offered were good and I’ve been to many home parties, but I refused to be the girl who every time I walked through a door, everyone wanted to look busy so that I wouldn’t approach them about my product or opportunity. I didn’t want to chase people down or feel the need to strike up a conversation at one of my daughter’s play dates with the hope of squeezing in a little sales pitch. I hate those conversations and I refused to take part in them.

That’s what drew me in to the Renegade Network Marketing system. I would be taught how to bring prospects to me, instead of having to pay for them or chase them down, and I could actually learn how to make money online…without being a computer genius.

I would be able to spend time with friends and family and talk about other important and fun stuff without having to sell my soul. It was what I had been searching for. My quest had finally ended and I had finally met my match!

As I would talk to friends, many of them also full-time homemakers, I would share where I was in my search. A large majority of them were in the same financial situation I was and were eager to see how my search ended. Would I actually succeed, or not? I committed to be the guinea pig and let them know the final results. Through my many conversations with friends, I realized that I wasn’t the only one out there so frustrated with this work-from-home idea and I wanted the ability to help others build their businesses from home as well. Whether they were moms, dads, college students (who’s paying off those school loans for you?), grandmas (yes, even a grandma can do this) or one of the thousands who have been laid-off from their job in this difficult economy…I wanted to help.

So here it is. You’re not going to become a millionaire overnight, and yes, you will actually have to work. But this system DOES work if you follow it and take it step-by-step.

I wish you all the best in your endeavor to become financially independent and I look forward talking with you soon!

God Bless,

Yvette Hampton
(Brooklyn’s Mommy)

Out of high school, at the age of 17, I had no clear direction on where I wanted my life to go (who really does at that age, anyway?). After attending a few classes at the local community college I decided that the military sounded like a good idea, so I joined and served in the United States Air Force for four years where I was trained as an aircraft electrician.

During my time in the Air Force, I learned many things about business. The first was that ANYTHING is possible. We performed seemingly impossible tasks daily, and never said, “that’s not my job”, or “I don’t think I can do that”. If there was a job to be done, no matter how complicated or how short the timeline, we found a way to do it. I also learned that I didn’t want to work for anyone but myself. So, after my departure from the Air Force, I decided to merge my love of music, and my love of not working for idiots, and I built and operated a small recording studio in the Los Angeles area. Along with the recording studio, my business partner and I started an independent record label.

I quickly learned that succeeding in business was so much more than knowing how to record or engineer music. As I began to understand what it took to establish, build and succeed in business, I quickly became intrigued by the world of business. I had taken business courses in college, but actually building a successful business as an entrepreneur was quite different than what I learned in the textbooks. My desire for a successful career caused me to dive in to every learning opportunity I could find. I began to read every business and marketing book I could get my hands on, went to training seminars, surrounded myself with other successful, some VERY successful, business owners, and learned a lot simply through trial and error. As I learned more about business, it became my passion. I love good business and good marketing, and I love the process of building systems and implementing the incremental, evolutionary, and revolutionary improvements that make a business great.

After owning the studio for a little more than four years, I decided I needed to move in a different direction, so I sold the company and began to look at other business opportunities. In time, my wife and I purchased a high-end retail stationery store, Paper Mulberry, which had been around for about seven years. We moved the business to a new location, and began to build systems, and grow our customer base. Yvette and I found that it was important to have clearly identified, and differentiated roles, so Yvette dealt with the customer service side of the business, I handled the operations and marketing.

As we adapted to our roles, and grew as a team, we enjoyed great success in business. Paper Mulberry grew rapidly, and we added staff and expanded our product line. We also built a successful website and online store to enhance our brick-and-mortar business. It was during the first year of business, that I really fine tuned my marketing skills. I had read and learned many things about effective marketing, but I hadn’t had the money, or opportunity to really put those things into practice before. With our purchase of the business, I definitely had the opportunity, and the business was producing plenty of money to put in place a very effective marketing and advertising campaign. Through the use of coupons, and direct response, I was able to track the effectiveness of each new campaign, and constantly worked to improve the results. Over time, our advertising became like a“faucet” and when we wanted to turn up our business, we just turned up the “faucet”.

In 2005 Yvette and I were blessed with our first child. Because we both wanted Yvette to stay home as a full-time mom, and I really couldn’t see myself selling wedding invitations and birth announcements forever, we decided to sell the business. It was when we listed the business, that I truly realized the impact of our marketing and system building efforts. Like many business owners, we had concentrated on the day-to-day aspects of building the business, and had never really stepped outside of the business to truly evaluate the effects of our efforts. Our business broker was excited to inform us, that we had the highest earnings per square foot of any business he had ever worked with. Every square foot of our little retail store produced almost $13,000 per year, in sales. Also, he was relieved to find that all of the preparation that goes into listing a business for sale, was already done. We had an up-to-date business plan, an operations and management manual, comprehensive business systems, and complete (and honest) financial records. Most importantly, the business was profitable. It made his job much easier, and added value to the business.

With the sale of Paper Mulberry, I began my career as a business and marketing consultant, and almost immediately, fell into a long-term consulting position (and Marketing Director title) at a real estate company. During this period, I helped other businesses on a short term basis, but was mainly focused on growing that business. In addition to bringing about great changes in the business, this was a great period of growth for me. I was able to dive deeply into the specialized world of real estate marketing, and attend some excellent seminars and classes. I made it a point during this time to take advantage of every opportunity I could, and it paid off.

When I arrived at Realty Response, the business was in a period of gradual decline. Even though the real estate market was still booming (for a while), Realty Response was stagnating. No one was responsible for advertising, and there was no marketing plan. Worse, there was no real direction, or plan for improvement. Suffice to say, dramatic changes were needed, but luckily, management was willing to allow major changes, and big successes followed.

During the first few weeks that I was there, I focused on reorganizing staff, and developing a cohesive plan for improvement. I began to systematize the business and wrote several manuals including business operations manuals, training manuals, and developed client presentations. As the plan was being refined, we began to implement some basic changes, that led to big results. The first thing we did, was begin a well tracked, direct mail advertising campaign. This allowed us to test marketing messages and begin to develop target markets. We would, later, shift much of the advertising budget away from direct mail, but this was a very good venue to begin a tested advertising campaign, and get the company moving forward again.

Over the next 2 years, we were able to increased sales leads by more than 300% and bring the company to top 10% performance among 400+ local real estate companies. We maintained, month-to-month, lead growth of 16% by continuously monitoring and refining advertising campaigns to increase their effectiveness. We were able to increase per transaction commission rates by 40.8% by revising the company’s commission structure. We started a sister company to provide referrals to the parent company, which produced over $1.5 million in business in its first year, and we launched an award-winning website, and implemented the company’s first complete Internet marketing system consisting of over 20 unique branded and unbranded URLs. Eventually, we reduced total advertising expense 75% by shifting focus from direct mail advertising to direct response Internet classifieds, pay-per-click, and other print campaigns, while continuously increasing the effectiveness of the company’s advertising.

Unfortunately, and as a testament to the depth and extent of the real estate market downturn, all the improvements couldn’t save Realty Response. The company had to make major cutbacks and relocate in order to weather the storm, and that meant I had to move on. I quickly found myself in another long-term consulting position at a market leading motion control company, and have remained there until now. While I have continued to work short-term consulting jobs for other small businesses, I have been blessed to be able to have a few long-term clients, and have been able to focus on the success of those companies. I am enjoying my position with a this very successful company, and am relieved to be able to focus on business improvements, rather than having to bail water from a sinking ship.

It is a great blessing to be able to expand my consulting reach through Renegade Marketing Strategies, and help many more small businesses achieve success. It is my passion to see these businesses flourish, and I am always happy to help.

garritt@renegademarketingstrategies.com

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THIRD PARTIES

Renegade Marketing Strategies may provide third parties with aggregate statistics about our customers, traffic patterns, and related site information. This data reflects site usage patterns gathered during thousands of customer visits to our Web site each month but does not contain behavioral or identifying information about any individual member, unless that member has given us permission to share that information. We may also provide log files and other databases of user information to third parties for analysis, so we can get a better understanding of traffic through our site and thus improve our content offerings. Renegade Marketing Strategies WILL NOT use third party companies to provide delivery of e-mail newsletters and other messages over e-mail.
Personal Information

When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information. If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use. We will not collect or use sensitive information for purposes other than those described in this Privacy Policy, unless we have obtained your prior consent.

You can decline to submit personal information to any of our services, in which case we may not be able to provide those services to you.

DATA INTEGRITY

Renegade Marketing Strategies processes personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

SECURITY

We take appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. However, we are not responsible for any breach of security.

 We restrict access to personal information to Rengade Marketing Strategies employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to operate, develop or improve our services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.

OBTAINING YOUR CONSENT

By using our Web site, you give Renegade Marketing Strategies permission to collect information about the pages served to you as an anonymous user for the purpose of calculating aggregate site statistics. If you register at Renegade Marketing Strategies, you authorize Renegade Marketing Strategies to use information you provide to personalize the information we deliver to you and to use your demographic information when calculating aggregate customer data.

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Privacy Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes). Each version of this Privacy Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date.

Renegade Marketing Strategies regularly reviews its compliance with this Privacy Policy. Please feel free to direct any questions or concerns regarding this Privacy Policy or our treatment of personal information by contacting us through this web site or by writing to us at:

Privacy
c/o Renegade Marketing Strategies
41851 25th street west
palmdale, ca 93551
USA

When we receive formal written complaints at this address, it is our policy to contact the complaining user regarding his or her concerns. We will cooperate with the appropriate regulatory authorities to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of personal data that cannot be resolved between Renegade Marketing Strategies and an individual.

This post was written on 10/28/08, but was pre-dated when posted for organizational reasons. Any Changes to this Privacy Policy will be dated 10/28/07, but the effective date of the Privacy Policy will be posted at the top of the Privacy Policy.