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Inside This Issue

Pinellas Life Update: Kiva.org and Pass It On Movie Feature Article: How to Stay Motivated by Dr. Zonnya Feature Member: Special Moments Events & Weddings Book of the Week: "Giving" by Bill Clinton Business & Marketing: Muscle Media Buying The Wild Wild Web:  WWW ... No Longer an Option by Deirdre Cavener Health & Fitness: Have you eaten your 60 services of spinach today? Recipe: Sherry and Mushroom Soup Calendar: September Complete Member Directory: Do business with our members first!

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Holiday Party Planning Time is NOW! Holidays are around the corner and Special Moments can help you wrap up your plans yearly so you can enjoy the holidays stress free! We offer the following services during the Holiday Season. - Holiday Shopping Service - Holiday Cards to purchase on-line - Holiday Card Addressing and Mailing service - Holiday Party and Event Planning - Holiday Decorating Services Dates book early so call us now to reserve your date before they are all wrapped up.  Mention Pinellas Life to receive an additional surprise savings on select services.  (727) 343-0800 | Special Moments Web Site

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Book of the Week

Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
by Bill Clinton

Book Description

Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action. Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, “regardless of income, available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.

Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving. Among them:

Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up living in the family bus in a trailer park, vowed to devote his life to giving high-quality medical care to the poor and has built innovative public health-care clinics first in Haiti and then in Rwanda;
a New York couple, in Africa for a wedding, who visited several schools in Zimbabwe and were appalled by the absence of textbooks and school supplies. They founded their own organization to gather and ship materials to thirty-five schools. After three years, the percentage of seventh-graders who pass reading tests increased from 5 percent to 60 percent;'
Oseola McCarty, who after seventy-five years of eking out a living by washing and ironing, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students;
Andre Agassi, who has created a college preparatory academy in the Las Vegas neighborhood with the city’s highest percentage of at-risk kids. “Tennis was a stepping-stone for me,” says Agassi. “Changing a child’s life is what I always wanted to do”;
Heifer International, which gave twelve goats to a Ugandan village. Within a year, Beatrice Biira’s mother had earned enough money selling goat’s milk to pay Beatrice’s school fees and eventually to send all her children to school—and, as required, to pass on a baby goat to another family, thus multiplying the impact of the gift.

Clinton writes about men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving. He writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent working conditions around the world. He shows us how one of the most important ways of giving can be an effort to change, improve, or protect a government policy. He outlines what we as individuals can do, the steps we can take, how much we should consider giving, and why our giving is so important.

Bill Clinton’s own actions in his post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he has become an international spokesperson and model for the power of giving.

“We all have the capacity to do great things,” President Clinton says. “My hope is that the people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service can be a powerful agent of change in the world.”

Buy it Now: Amazon

Business & Marketing

"Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is." - Fairfax Cone

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The Wild, Wild, Web

WWW ... No Longer an Option!

By Deirdre Cavener, MCP

Published: September 2007 Bay Area Business Magazine

The growth of the Internet and wireless technology is providing businesses with exciting and innovative ways to reach customers. Now your target audience can do business with you from any location including their car, a doctor’s office, even the beach.

A Web site is no longer an “optional marketing tool.” It is one of the most critical weapons in your marketing arsenal.

• Those businesses that use the Internet grew 46% faster than those that didn’t. - The US Department of Commerce

• 87% of the online users depend on the Internet to access local information. - Digitrends

• 52.7% of the online business directory users visit a merchant because of what they saw online. - Digitrends

What is a Web Site?

A Web site is an extension of your business and a barometer of your credibility. A Web site allows your business to deliver key purchasing information about your products and/or services to your target demographic 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to anyone with Internet access. Your site should provide your customers with everything they need to make a purchasing decision (customer service, branding, product/service information, support, etc.).

The idea of building something before it has been fully defined, designed and planned would be considered negligent in many other industries, yet it happens all the time in Web development.

The Web Development Lifecycle … Building Blocks to Success

• Plan

• Design

• Develop

• Promote

• Maintain

Plan

The planning phase of a Web Development project is the most critical of the lifecycle. During planning you need to put your business and your customers under a microscope. Find out about your customers’ buying habits and search behavior, favorite Web sites, and whatever other statistics are important to your business. This is where Search Engine Optimization should start. When you have a complete blueprint of your Web site you are ready to move on to the design phase.

Skills Required: Business, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Design - Digital Branding; The Look & Feel

The design phase is where the graphical representation and creativity of your Web site is born. The design should be similar to a magazine cover and mirror your current branding campaign while providing a clean, informative and easy to navigate layout. A picture conveys a thousand words and I cannot stress enough how important professional photography is in the design of a visually captivating Web site. Studies show that you have a mere five seconds to either pull the customer further into your site or send them to the competition.

Skills Required: Graphic Design (Adobe)

Develop

The development phase is where your graphic design becomes a Web site! During this phase the data collected for the Search Engine Optimization is added to the individual pages along with the content and photography. Remember, each page should be given the same attention as the home page because you never know where the user will initially enter your site.

Skills Required: Programming (HTML, ASP, Java, VB)

Promote - Traditional & Digital Advertising

Incorporate a strategic pull and push advertising campaign to fully promote your Web site. By using both traditional and digital advertising you have the potential to reach a wide audience of customers.

Pull advertising targets customers actively seeking your product or service. If someone conducts an Internet Search for your type of business, you want to be found on the FIRST page. Pull advertising includes search engine optimization, online directory listings, local portal listings, and pay-per-click campaigns.

54% of people have replaced the Yellow Pages with the Internet. – Kelsey Group

BUYER BEWARE! Before spending money on Web site advertising find out how many unique visitors and page views a Web site receives. Web sites that advertise HITS as a measure of traffic are misleading consumers. One page can receive many hits making it an inaccurate measure of traffic. For example, a Web page loaded with pictures and graphic advertising banners will get a hit for each graphic. You want to know how many people (unique visitors) frequent the site and how many pages (page views) they visit.

Push advertising markets your Web site to an entire group of potential customers. Your print ads should drive the customer to your Web site with a call to action … print a coupon, request information, enter a contest, download an article, or purchase a product and/or service.

Remember to include your Web address everywhere you have your company name!

Maintain & Update … Keep it Fresh

Keep your Web site information up to date and fresh. This can be done daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your type of business.

The Internet is forever changing the way we conduct business. Wireless technology is creating an entire set of “pocket customers.” Imagine the potential in designing marketing that goes wherever your customer goes! It just doesn’t get any better than that!

Deirdre Cavener, MCP is president and CEO of K.I.S.S. Marketing, Inc. and founder of PinellasLife.com. She has lived in the Tampa Bay area for 23 years and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of South Florida in 1996 with a degree in Management Information Systems from the College of Business.

Visit Bay Area Business Magazine for more Best Practice Business Articles.

Health & Wellness

Have you eaten your 60 servings of spinach today?

You’d have to eat that much in order to get the same amount of iron you would have gotten from one serving of spinach grown in 1948. And you’d have to eat 25 cups to get even the measly RDA of vitamin E.

What’s going on here?

Today, I’ll explain exactly what’s wrong with commercial produce, and show you how to boost the nutritional content of your diet to better your general health and resistance to disease.

Modern agricultural techniques are the culprits. The fruits and vegetables on today’s supermarket shelves come from nutrient-poor soil grown on chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides. Not to mention genetically modified produce, which farmers aren’t required to label.

What’s more, in order to get these foods to the store before they start to rot, commercial growers harvest fruits and vegetables before they’ve had time to ripen. (You’ve noticed how bananas in the produce aisle are green when you buy them.)

Before the onset of industrial agriculture, farmers relied on natural fertilizers to grow their produce. In order to insure freshness, grocers bought foodstuffs from local farmers, so the fruits and vegetables available to Americans decades ago had time to ripen in the sun naturally - so yesteryear’s produce contained much higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and other natural compounds essential to your health.

What can you do about it? One simple way to go is to buy local organically grown fruits and vegetables whenever possible. Not only will you avoid pesticides and other chemicals – you’ll get a lot more of Nature’s beneficial ingredients.

The science backs me up on this. A recent study published in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry found that organic tomatoes contain almost twice as much of an important type of compound – called “flavonoids” – as conventionally grown tomatoes.1

Flavonoids are naturally occurring anti-oxidants found in a number of plants, including tomatoes, blueberries, grapes, and green tea. The benefits of anti-oxidants cannot be overstated. Here are just a few of the benefits linked to flavonoids:

• Improved circulation

• Lower cholesterol

• Lower blood pressure

• Reduced inflammation

• Reduced risk of rheumatoid arthritis

• Increased bone strength

• Reduced risk of heart disease

• Stronger immune response

• Faster recovery from sunburn

• Reduced risk of many types of cancer, including lung, prostate, and skin cancer

• Memory loss prevention

• Higher metabolism and greater weight loss

So if you find both conventionally grown and organic tomatoes at your local grocer, the choice is a no-brainer – go organic. Even better, find a local farmer or co-op to buy from. The same rule of thumb applies to meat, eggs and milk, for the simple reason that they will contain more of the ingredients your body needs for optimum health.

Taking supplements is another effective way to compensate for today’s nutrient-poor produce. Vitamin E, vitamin C, selenium, CoQ10, and alpha lipoic acid are all powerful anti-oxidants that improve heart health, slow the aging process, prevent cancer, and even boost your brainpower.

Here are my recommended daily amounts for each of these nutrients. They are the building blocks for an anti-oxidant powerhouse:

• Vitamin E – 400 IEU

• Vitamin C – 1,000 mg

• Selenium – 55 micrograms

• CoQ10 – 100 mg

• Alpha lipoic acid – 100 mg

To Your Good Health,

Al Sears, MD
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