No matter where you are around the world, whenever you are in a karaoke bar there are a select group of people that get up and wow the crowd.
So what are the secret tips you need to become the star of the show?

1. Choose your song wisely
Many people choose a karaoke track that is very popular or one that will win over the crowd however is that the best way to choose your karaoke track? Choosing a track which you love rather than what you think the audience will enjoy will produce vastly different results.

2. Discover your “banquet song”
In Hong Kong it’s known as your “banquet song”, in Japan it’s your Juhachiban, but it all means one thing; your signature karaoke track. Having one karaoke track that you know well, and fits your vocal range is the perfect way to truly shine on stage.

3. Know your boundaries
Whether it you are just beginning out in karaoke, or have spent a number of years at your favourite club, the best tip is know and understand your boundaries. By knowing your boundaries on karaoke tracks and originally staying within your scope will give you the confidence to achieve perfection.

4. Be aware of a possible “bad night”
Everyone who has jumped on stage can remember the one time they felt they failed in their karaoke track choice. Even the professionals you train for years have bad nights on stage, so do not take it to heart. The best advice is to think what you can do to avoid it in the future.

5. Sing like nobody is listening
The biggest reason why people don’t want to get up on stage is the fear of singing out loud in public. The best way of overcoming your fear is to close your eyes and imagine that you are singing at home. That way you will sing from your heart and you’ll see the audience get into it.

6. Practice makes perfect
To make the jump from just a beginner at the karaoke bar to someone who thrills the crowd is practice. By doing so, not only will you be more confident in knowing the lyrics and tones of your song, but you will have a lot more confidence in singing it in front of people.

7. A little investment can go a long way
Practising at home is a great way to perfect your singing technique, but the best way to develop your voice is to purchase your own karaoke machine. Purchasing your own machine along with a number of karaoke CDG’s will mean you will feel comfortable around one, and will teach you how to perform your best.

8. Smile, relax… and above all have fun!
The key to great karaoke singing is that most of the singers up there simply because they love being on stage. If you are trying too hard, or finding it frustrating that you are not developing faster than you thought, simply go back to the first karaoke track and notice the difference in your style.

Just remember, nine times out of ten the audience are not looking for singing perfection. But if you are smiling and enjoying yourself, then the audience will definitely pick up your excitement and get into the song.

Source: Personal Development

Of the thousands of different scrapbooking store options around the world, there are a few in particular that you should definitely become more familiar with.

Scrapbooks by Design

The Scrapbooks by Design scrapbooking store is one of the leaders in the world of scrapbooking supplies. They only carry the latest scrapbook lines and are happy to place special orders with any of the manufacturers that they deal with. Just a few of the many items they offer for scrapbooking include metal accents, paper, pens, pencils, albums, cardstock, memory tools, and stickers.

You also know that you can trust in this store because they feature only the top names in the world of scrapbooking, from All Night Media, American Crafts, Anna Griffin, Arctic Frog, Fiskars, Fancy Pants and EK Success to Grafix, Green Sneakers, 7 Gypsies, All My Memories, Generations, and more.

Lovebug Scrapbooking Store

The Lovebug Scrapbooking Store is another great option, and offers everything you could possibly need for your scrapbooking projects. A few of their most popular products include albums, embellishments, adhesives, albums, books, pens, markers, ribbons, templates, stamping, storage, bags, and more.

Addicted to Scrapbooking

Considered as the world’s largest scrapbooking company, Addicted to Scrapbooking is a great place to shop for all your scrapbooking needs. They offer dots and tabs, liquid glues, sheets, tapes, art prints and finished artwork, beads, books and magazines, chalks, cleaners, coloring tools, craft basics, die cuts, digital media, flowers, and much more.

They are a company that you can trust in because they deal with only the top names in the scrapbooking business. This includes Alias Smith & Rowe, American Crafts, Anna Griffin, Arctic Frog, Beary Patch Inc., Books by Hand, Fiber Scraps, Far and Away, Flair Designs, Gel-A-Tins, Magenta, Magic Mesh, Marimekko, Making Memories, Magistical Memories, Petaloo, Polar Bear Press, Pressed Petals, Provo Craft, Penny Black, Patchwork Paper, Paper Inspirations, Paper House Productions and more.

These are a few of the online stores that are available, but if you would rather a retail store in your local area that you can visit to check the supplies out firsthand before buying, this will be a great idea.

Source: scrapbooking

Enter BlinkWeb.

Finally… An easy way to create a professional looking website without knowing HTML, PHP, Javascript, and all the other techie nonsense needed to put a website online. (Well, okay, it’s not nonsense, it’s how I make a living (in my day job), but it is *nonsense* to a lot of folks).

Let’s face it, it should NOT be complicated to create a website. I mean, come on, it’s the year 2008! By now, you shouldn’t be forced to use bulky HTML editing software or pay some “nerd” (that would be me!) thousands of dollars to create a site for you.

For the past 8 months, Brad and Matt Callen, have been working extremely hard to provide a solution to this MAJOR problem that most people face. (You might know them as the creators of SEO Elite, Keyword Elite, Affiliate Elite and other web tools designed to make your Internet/Network Marketing business explode).

They’ve created a short video (below) to show you just how easy it will be to create a professional looking website with Blinkweb. I’m super excited about it and they have poured their hearts and souls into creating this for you, so I hope you like it.

After watching the video, please post your comments below by clicking on the comments link. I’d LOVE to hear what you think!

Convinced? Here’s where you can go sign up for your free account right now.

BlinkWeb - Website Creation In The Blink Of An Eye

There are a number of ways to get subscribers to your list. The easiest way to build your own list is to offer a free e-book or software on your website. The freebie that you offer should relate to your site and should be unique. You need to remember that offering an e-book or software that is valuable for your subscriber is the first step towards building trust with your prospective customers.

To start building your list, you will need to have a good web form to capture the visitor details. Ideally this form should be placed on pages with good articles. If the visitor finds the information worth the visit, they will eventually subscribe to your list to get more information and updates. You should keep your web form simple and easy to sign. You should also assure your visitors that they will not be spammed and their details will not be shared with any one.

You need to show your subscribers that you are an expert in your field. You can achieve this by providing honest reviews and informative articles on your site. You should also put some efforts in making your site look professional and easy to use. Visitors would not want to subscribe to any list offered on Made for Adsense web sites.

Another way to build up your list is to offer an email course on your niche site. Such email courses are readily available in most private label content sites. Instead of creating your own web forms, you can also opt for various auto responders. Auto Responders help in keeping your list manageable and organized. Before deciding on any auto responder service for mailing to your list you need to do some research on whether that auto responder has been involved in any kind of spamming.

Once you have built your list, you should take care to endorse and recommend only products that you trust. Offering a bad product might earn you some money but it will also ensure that your subscribers opt out of your list quickly. A satisfied customer can help grow your list by recommending your site and you will end up having more potential buyers.

The most important part of list building is never to lose the trust your subscribers have in you. If your subscribers are spammed or they buy a bad product endorsed on your site, they will not only opt out of your list but also talk about this to earn you a bad reputation.

Building your own profitable list is definitely a long and tedious process, and maintaining one is will require even more efforts. But the reward of having your own list is worth the effort you put in.

But if no one sees all of your great content, does it really matter?

If you have no traffic to your website, is your content really that great?

Yes, your content is that great, but the Internet is not a “build it and they will come” type of environment. If it were, we all would have gotten very rich a long time ago and I probably wouldn’t have to sit down and write out this article for you.

But, since we have to drive traffic to our sites and since “drive” is one of those terrible, horrible words we affectionately refer to as “verbs” (you know, the ones that generally indicate that you have to do something), we’ve got to get off our rear ends and do something to get more traffic.

Otherwise, you can take that great content and stick it in a barrel, no one will ever know it exists.

5 Ways to Get Traffic to your Website

At this point, there’s only about 365 million ways that you can get traffic to your site, but I’m only going to cover five with you right now. All of these methods have a proven track record and are completely free. Well, they don’t cost any money, just some of your time and hard work.

(Yes, you still have to work to make money online, contrary to what the last five messages in your inbox just told you.)

1. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines. I’m no SEO expert and please don’t take this short little blurb as the definitve guide to SEO. There’s many more people far better able to tell you the ins and outs of SEO, but let’s just get some of the basics down. You want your site optimized for the search engines because search engine traffic is always and forever FREE. Give your web pages or blog posts descriptive titles that contain the keywords you want to target. If you want people to find your page when they search for “New York City defense attorney”, make sure those words are in your page title. Include those keywords throughout your article, but don’t make it sound silly. And make sure that when someone links to your site that they use your keywords in their link to your site. That one tip will help you get better search engine results and more free traffic.

To get more in-depth knowledge on search engine optimization, stop what you’re doing right now and go pick up a copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Aaron is a great copywriter and knows his stuff about SEO. The best part is, you get updates for life when you buy the book as SEO techniques change all the time. Go now and get your copy, then come back here and finish reading. I promise I’ll still be here when you come back.

2. Exchange links with other websites. Now, before you get all goofy, don’t go and get yourself wrapped up in one of those “link farms” that charge you a fee to link back to your site. Not good and you’ll get penalized for it. Find some other websites that are similar to yours or are related and ask for a link exchange. Just make sure you follow through on your end and put a link back to their site.
You also need to work on getting backlinks to your site from other sites. The more sites you have linking to you, the better your search engine rankings will be. Again, stay away from the “link farms” and get some help from Michelle MacPhearson and her 30 Minute Backlinks video tutorials.

3. Look for Joint Ventures. Joint ventures can be very powerful if done in the right way. Give your partners some really good reasons why they should promote your site. By providing them with the right promotional tools such as e-mails, signatures, articles, etc., he/she would no doubt accept your request. To ensure that your website gets better results, look for website owners that have the capability of sending a lot of traffic to you.

4. Join online groups, forums, etc. that could help you with promoting your website. For example, you may post your sites URL in your signature file for the users to see. So you can be a known member by the discussion groups you join, simply participate in discussions that interest you and contribute your knowledge and expertise to the rest of the members.

5. Get a free blog. Blogging is another free method that generates traffic to your website. Post some high-quality information regularly and don’t forget to ping all your posts as it can help in driving traffic to your website. You can sign up for a free blog at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com.

Now, this list is not exhaustive by any means. But it’s something to get you started. Whether you’re wanting to drive traffic to your personal site or your business site, these tips will get you on the right track. But they will don nothing for you if you don’t take action! Get started today and start seeing more traffic come to your website, see more clicks, and see more money coming to you!

You wake up, eager to spend some time on your blog and stumble bleary-eyed over to the computer to see what wonderous activities have happened on your blog during your well deserved but long over due slumber. Blinking the *sleepies* from your eyes you login to your email client and see 382 new messages from your blog announcing comments!

Excited to see the feedback to the amazing post you sweated over for 3 days, you quickly click into the comment moderation area of your blog, only to find all 382 are spam!

If this sounds like you, you are not alone. In fact, one reader sent this question in just yesterday. If one is asking then 10 are wondering, so let me take a couple of minutes and suggest a few things you can do.

Jim Feilen writes:

Anyway to reduce getting spam messages on my blog? I have it so I have to approve before it will post but I am getting more spam each day.

Jim

Welcome to 2008. We fight against spam in our inboxes, our blogs and our postal mail boxes (although less and less in the mailbox these days).

Spammer robots allow people with no conscience or understanding of karmic laws to automatically add comments to hundreds or even thousands of blogs every day. Getting yourself out of the line of fire is a topic worthy of several posts, but today I will just list the top 5 ways I have found to reduce or eliminate spam on your Wordpress blog.

If you know of others, I invite your comments so my readers can benefit from your insight, wisdom and hard earned *blogger-guru* status.

Akismet Wordpress Plugin

Akismet comes with Wordpress and is one of the first things you should try to reduce the amount of spam hitting your blog.

You do have to sign up for a Wordpress.com account in order to activate it (not sure why this is, it just is). I covered this in detail and provided screen shots and step by step instructions for this process over on my other blog. It’s an article titled "Akismet: Stopping The Spam Madness "

Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist

Updating the Settings | Discussion options on your Wordpress blog to include some keywords in both the moderation and blacklist boxes for comments will also help.

Plan to add to this over time, but here are some that are in my list. Drug, pill, porn, anal, sex, gay, penis, viagra, insurance, lesbian, enlarge, brevibloc, celis, [url, xxx.

Notice I didn’t include all variations of the word for drugs. That’s because this feature will match the "inside words" as well. So, "drug" will match "drugs", "freedrug" and "sexdrug".

I should mention that I have nothing against old men who need or want viagra, gay’s or car insurance salesmen. I just don’t think my blog is the proper forum for that kind of message. I could be wrong.

Adding "nofollow" with a Wordpress tweak

One of the reason your blog will be targeted (aside from the missing karmic consciencious of the spammer of course), is that any "ranking" you receive from Google, can be passed on to people that link from your site to theirs.

You can reduce the "attractiveness" of your blog in this respect, by having all your comments contain a "nofollow" tag. This effectively tells the search engine not to follow any links from your comment area, back to where they point to.

There is a Wordpress plugin which I recommend that does this for you. In fact, it does a LOT for you. A a complete list is shown over on the post I did when reviewing this cool plugin , which you can read here. You can also go get a copy for yourself at the Wordpress Expert blog here.

Addon Plugins like Spam Karma (2.3) or Wordpress Comment Spam Stopper

Both of these Wordpress plugins are specially designed to reduce the crap in your comments. (Can I say crap?) As you will see from my notes above, I have an affinity for the Unknown Genius.

He and I think a lot alike when it comes to the spammers of the world. And although he doesn’t say it straight out, I will. Spammers should be dipped in honey, hung by their toes and ants turned loose beneath them.

Spam Karma 2.3

Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. Spam Karma 2 is the proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code

Wordpress Comment Spam Stopper Plugin

Spamming is a common problem, I was getting (at least) 1000 spam messages a week, and I was sick of it. I’m sure also having so many spam messages stored in the database (even if identified by askimet) must have a speed impact on your blog.

Therefore I have created a simple solution to stopping spam at the source: asking a simple question that bots are too stupid to know in the comment form. I know only get about 10 spams per week, rather than 1000!

So Jim, I hope this helps with your blogging spam problem. I appreciate the question.

If any of you know of others, I invite your comments so my readers can benefit from your insight, wisdom and hard earned *blogger-guru* status.

Method One

If it’s important to you that the visitor know he/she is being redirected, you can provide a command to the “browser” to refresh the page within X seconds, and upon completion, redirect the browser to another page.

< meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="3;URL=http://www.NewWebsiteToVisit.com" />

Include the line shown above in your HTML code for the web page between the HEAD tags. Notice the “content=”3;URL=http://www.NewWebsiteToVisit.com” part of the code. That tells the browser to wait 3 seconds, and then refresh the contents of the browser with the new web address. If you are waiting more than a split second (content=0.1), then you want to make sure you page displays something that let’s them know they are about to be redirected. This is a good method to use when you move a website from one place to another. You can use the original page to notify them they need to update bookmarks or call Aunt Sue and let her know as well.

Method Two

Exactly like method one, with one exception. Use a content=0.1 value, which will cause the browser to redirect the visitor immediately. One note though. You should make sure your title on the page that contains the redirect code matches the title on the page they are being taken to.

Method Three

I like this one the best. It’s called an IFrame Redirect. Basically, with the code shown below, you display the contents of a different web page, on yours! Your domain name, address and URL visible to the web visitor all stay the same, but the contents are read from another site. Possible applications for this type of redirect would be if you are marketing an affiliate product and want to display the capture page of the product, but you want to give out a professional domain name or web address. For example, let’s say you are promoting a product as an affiliate, and they give you a link to promote. The link (I made this up, do don’t try to go there) http://www.MyCoolSoftware.com/pr/e/go/?id=7732fg

Now, who in their right mind is gonna remember that, tell their friends or type all that in? If however, you purchased a domain name like www.HereYaGo.com and you are recommending (promoting) a product called CoolMusicPlayer, then you could create a directory called CoolMusicPlayer on the HereYaGo.com domain and send people to a link that looks like this (again, this is made up, don’t try it) http://www.HereYaGo.com/CoolMusicPlayer

Easier to remember, but it still displays the webpage for the product.

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head>
< meta http-equiv="Refresh" content=".1;URL=http://www.MyCoolSoftware.com/pr/e/go/?id=7732fg" />
< body>
< /body>
< /html>

Please note: I had to put spaces after the angle brackets because the post keep trying to send a visitor to that page! Just remove the spaces.

Okay, as you can see from the code above, that ugly affiliate link is being used to display the actual content of the page. It’s just a short piece of code and it doesn’t help you much when it comes to Google loving your page. You need a title, some keywords, and a description and that can get a little tedious.

Like any good programmer when presented with a repetitive task, I automated it. I created a piece of software to let me enter the title, URL, keywords and description, and have it build my iFrame redirect PHP file. Once build, I just upload the new index.php file to the directory of my choice, and viola! Done.

Want that?

Here ya go. http://www.videos.bycenay.com/iFrameGen.htm — and click the download button. It’s all yours. Enjoy.

Emails, forum posts, MySpace messages and phone calls from other business entrepreneurs all asking the same thing, decided the matter for me. I simply don’t have enough time in the day to answer each question (especially when it’s the same question, over and over) for each person. It’s a matter of logistics now.

So, I decided to put together this blog, and answer each question with as much detail as necessary so that anyone, regardless of computer experience or “Internet Savvy” could understand and implement the “answer”.

I also decided to add an “Ask Me Anything” section to sorta “take requests”. I figure answering each question once — means I can answer more. So, if you can’t find what you are looking for, even after using the Site Search feature, feel free to send me the question.

I enabled comments on each post as well, and encourage you to let me know if you agree or not, found the “answer” to be complete (or not), or what would have helped you understand it better. Help me make this site a valuable resource for anyone, regardless of experience.

I look forward to hearing from YOU!

PS: Decided to add other categories for *How Do You Do That*. So look for new How-To’s in a wide variety of topics. Want to see something specific? Just shoot me an email