JustinSpeak

Step 1. - Portion control, portion control, portion control. I cannot stress this enough. When you go out to eat, section off a third of each food on your plate. Don’t eat that third. You don’t have to eat every fucking morsel they put on your plate. When you’re cooking at home, remember that your stomach is the size of your two fists. Yes, it can stretch, but it doesn’t have to.

Step 2. - Eat slowly. There are so many benefits to eating slowly and really tasting your food that I could write blog posts on only that topic for the rest of my life. However, for the sake of brevity, I’ll keep a tight focus. Eating slowly allows your body to acclimate to the food you just swallowed so you don’t eat too much before you realize you’re full. Besides, chewing your food slowly, savoring every bite, and having a more intimate relationship with your food just makes it taste better.

Step 3. - Put a big time limit on how much red meat you consume. I suggest this for two reasons. First, red meat is pretty fatty to begin with. Second, the deplorable conditions they have to raise beef cattle here in the US makes me sick. Don’t support that industry. You have any idea how much natural resources are used to feed and transport that meat? Tons. I could get really political here, but the real health benefit to limiting your read meat consumption is that you consume less fatty meats. Eat fish instead.

Step 4. - Exercise. I don’t care what you do, just exercise. One could say that exercising is a lot like saving for retirement. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it. Join a gym, jog, park farther away from the office, take the stairs, clean house, play sports, garden, do whatever you must, just exercise!

Step 5. - Lay off the beer and soda. This one is hard for me, but it is necessary to keep a few inches off your waist. Don’t deny yourself a tasty brewski here and there, but just don’t drink fifty of them in one night. Same with the soda. Limit yourself to two per week.

That’s the blog post for today. Enjoy.

1. Put your main keywords in your domain. For example, if your site is about guitars, then I’d consider putting the word “guitar” in your URL. Sounds like a no brainer right? Well, take a guess what this site sells: www.wavetogo.com. Give up? Paintball. Now guess what this store sells: www.antennasdirect.com. See my point?

2. For the love of all things holy, fix your fucking URLs. No matter what platform you use to run your site, there are options to change the URLs to something that is not only search engine friendly, but also people friendly. Here’s an example of a bad URL: www.jamtronics.com/product_info.php/products_id/2330. If you could figure out by that URL that the page on that site sells a Logitech cordless mouse, then you’ve got some crazy talent. Now for the good URL: www.e-paintball.com/Smart-Parts-Vibe-Paintball-Gun-08-p-19318.html. I’ll bet they are selling a Smart Parts “Vibe” paintball gun! My new name is Schmidtsrodamus.

3. If a user can’t navigate through your site and find what they need, neither are the search engine crawlers. Promise me you’ll follow best practices for navigation when you build your site. Good: www.ebay.com. Bad: www.customstaffinginc.com. Ugly: www.donniedarkofilm.com. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Custom Staffing site has a perfect URL, and a very aesthetically pleasing design. However there are no breadcrumbs, no immediate eye path, nothing. Same with the Donnie Darko site. One of my absolute favorite movies of all time. Furthermore, I think that site is really cool, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get anywhere. That is sort of the point, I suppose, but if you’re concerned about SEO then I suggest you stay far away from movie and band sites as they tend to place all their emphasis on the aesthetic.

4. Relevant content with relevant links to other relevant content on relevant sites or your own site. There was one word that appeared four times in that last sentence. Guess what it is? Write and provide relevant content to the topic! It is precisely for this reason why the Wikipedia entry for any given query always ends up really high on the SERPs. While I have some qualms about the design and navigation of this site, it is absolutely PACKED with relevant content and links: www.goodcharacter.com.

5. TITLE YOUR FUCKING PAGES! The reason for my capital letters and foul language: www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=untitled+document

So there you have it. There are a lot of companies that pay big money for SEO. I just gave you five great tips for free.

Oh, one more thing my dearest reader, I realize that JustinSpeak doesn’t follow all of my own advice. This is due to two things. First, this blog isn’t intended to make me a billionaire, its just a site where I can rant and rave and share cool ideas with the world. Second, I’m a little lazy. I work all day on Internet Marketing. When I come home, I like to play guitars, chase girls, and fire up the old xbox.

AMF,
Justin

I really wish we could do something about credit cards. I, like most people my age, have a little bit of credit card debt that is going to take me a little bit to pay off. Some people are less fortunate. Everyone has heard the horror story of this person with like $8000 in debt or something outrageous. Could you imagine? For all I know some of you, my dearest readers, may have astronomical credit card debt that you are struggling to eliminate. I wish you luck.

Then we have the mortgage and refinance industry. You’ve seen the commercials. Some company like Country Wide touts their great ability to help you easily pay off all your debt and roll it all into one easy bill. That’s fine and all, but you do realize that those companies skim quite a bit off the top? First you have to pay a lot of “fees” that don’t really exist. Trust me, I’ve seen how this works from the inside. I’m not bullshitting. When you see something like processing fee, set up fee, application fee or any other type of fee, the honest to god truth is that a lot of those are completely made up by the lender. Furthermore, the rate that your loan officer gives you is at least a point or two higher than it could be because those loan officers are paid on commission. You cannot hate them for it. Remember, they are just doing their job and trying to get paid.

Does anyone really want to borrow against their property to pay off high interest credit cards? Of course not. However, the buy on credit system has gotten a lot of people in over their heads. Hell, I’m one of them!

I cannot stress how important it is that if you want to eliminate debt, the first thing you should do is cut up all the cards. Do not cancel them, that reflects poorly on your credit scores. Instead, cut them up and set aside a budget to pay them off. When you get the card to zero you can do one of two things. If the card has no fee, keep the account running and maybe put a small payment on it to make it carry a positive balance. If the card does have an annual fee, then I suggest you close the account only after you have paid down the balance.

I really didn’t intend to have this blog become a financial advice column, but it sort of turned out that way. To tell you the truth, whenever I sit down to blog I never know what is going to happen with it. All I do is type.

Happy Mother’s Day to all applicable readers!