Hope everyone had good Labor Day, whether you were relaxing or keeping your entrepreneurial pedal to the metal.

My weekend was very productive and enjoyable. I got some serious thinking and writing completed. I played solid tennis and watched the US Open too.

Holidays on Mondays always seem to throw my calendar off a bit. I thought it was Monday all day.

It likely didn’t help matters that I spent half the day grueling over two fraud charges on one of my credit cards.

A lesson about fraud for everyone with a credit card.

Six months ago, I noticed two charges on one of my credit cards. The first flag: it was a card I never use; the second: it was paid to Web hosting company with whom I have not done business.

I immediately called American Express. They opened an investigation and removed the charges. I never thought about it again, until this morning when I received two letters from a collections agency about these two charges, demanding payment and informing me that my credit score was at risk.

Again, I called American Express immediately. They were very nice and helpful, but explained that once something goes to a collection agency, they are out of the loop and the responsibility is back on the card owner. They said I needed to call the collections agency. Boy that was a treat. Even though they tell you that the calls will be monitored, the service and level of kindness was a minus 15 on a 1-5 scale.

This took one and one-half hours. I got disconnected twice and rerouted three times. When I finally had a live person on the phone, she scolded me for assuming the credit card company had handled the matter and informed me I needed to call the company who registered the charge. Here we go again.

I called the Web service provider and experienced the same dreadful phone tree, excessive hold time, disconnect, and redirect for around an hour more. Eventually, I heard “Customer service and billing how can I help you?”
I explained my story again, now for the third time to the 11th person, and he said, “Ma’am, just because American Express removed the charge from your card, does not mean you don’t owe us this money. It is your responsibility to contact our fraud department if, in fact, you think its fraud. Would you like me to connect you?”

In a calm, yet hostile voice I said, “Please!”

Wouldn’t you know it—the fraud department voice mailbox was full. I had to leave a message and I got a double shot of tequila.

About an hour later a gentleman phoned me back. “I’m Josh from fraud services at company XYZ returning your call.” I explained my situation again; I don’t know this company, never bought anything from them, etc. He put me on hold and said, “Let me look into something.”

After grilling me with bunch of questions, there was a pause. “Ms. Post, I see a series of missing information in this record. That means I believe you are telling the truth and concur that this is fraud charge. I will remove the charge of $39.00 from your account and you are free to get back to your life.” OK, I made up that last part.

Here’s the point. A small charge like this one for $39.00 can screw up your credit for a long time and cause you to waste a boat load full of precious time along the way.

If something appears on your credit card that is not yours, you must file a claim with the provider, and monitor it until it is resolved. Filing a claim with your credit card is not enough!

In the midst of this bloody mess, while on hold, via one of my great interns, I did discover two very cool, FREE tools to help monitor your competition and your online footprint success. Check these out.

Find out what your site is worth

$timator.com is a calculator that ranks a site’s worth based on SEO, content, back links, traffic, and more and provides you a snapshot of your online effectiveness. Happy to report, Oddpodz earned a “very good” on overall site evaluation and a valuation of just under $600,000. You can run your site along with any of your competitors.

Find out how your site is ranking with social media, buzz, and other marketing channels

Dataopedia.com provides a lot of diverse data concerning the Web; gathering data from more than 50 sources. Datopedia.com is an aggregation web service that lets users find out all the valuable facts about any website, such as traffic, online buzz, contact information, popularity in social bookmarking services…in short, all the essential facts about every website you can come across on the Internet.

This tool is one-stop resource for finding website facts, and the service can be accessed via the website, the mobile site, embeddable widgets for your website, and browser add-ons.

About the author: Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva® is an international authority on branding, marketing, and entrepreneurial matters. She has been featured as a business expert in print publications; on TV, radio, and on Web channels. Karen authored the best-selling book Brain Tattoos Creating Unique Brands That Stick in your Customers’ Minds and she is co-founder and CEO of Oddpodz.com.

Saturday I drove from Tampa to Hilton Head. It was a 7 hour drive and a good opportunity to listen to CD’s and podcasts. I stumbled upon some awesome free business ones on itunes. They were produced by Sales Gravy and truly gave me a nice kick in the butt. I highly recommend these to anyone feeling the pressure of the times and also level of self inflicted doubt. The reality is only you can bring on doubt and only you can remove it.

Jeb Blount the voice behind the message was really good. He addresses self-esteem, fears and choices in a very direct way. Which are all key factors in moving from pining to achieving results.

Jeb has over 20 years experience in sales and marketing. As a business leader he has extensive experience turning around and righting troubled organizations. He has a passion for growing people and the unique ability to see potential in everyone. Over the span of his career he has coached, trained, and developed hundreds of Sales Professionals, managers and leaders.

Beyond his podcasts, his site has a network and loads of good resources, all worth checking out. A lot of what he says you know. But he delivers it in a very compelling and inspirational style. As I was finishing the 10-12 segment series, a buddy of mine called. He was down and out and feeling very discouraged. His car broke down, his cash was almost gone and he was feeling like a big looser. I joked about him listening to the podcasts and considering pole dancing for extra cash, he was not amused and grumbled something back at me. While I feel his pain, hanging in that attitude is not going to put a deposit in his bank. Listening to to this podcast will.

I know it’s tough to smile when you feel like you are being shot at, but moving and grooving forward will significantly increase your chances of avoiding deadly bullets. Many a great successful leader felt like this, the same despair and they did not crater, they focused on action and attitude.

If being an entrepreneur was easy, everyone would be doing it.

We found yet another success story for the FREE offer as a more than viable business strategy. This tale wil also show that ideas don’t always come from reading the business section. Part of the Sunday morning routine in the Savannah office is to read the New York Times while eating brunch and undoing all the healthy eating that has been practiced Monday through Saturday.

We always read the Women’s Sports Section, aka, the Styles Section. There, we find out what fashions have been spotted on Manhattan streets, how to mind our P’s and Q’s and see if any long lost friends have taken the matramonial plunge. There’s also usually a few interesting other stories sprinkled throughout.

This week, we learned about the rush to build apps for the iPhone. Apparently, (we wouldn’t know since we’re not cellphone geeks) one can buy all kinds of apps (games, ski report finders, a program that will fog up your screen with steam) for their phone. There are thousands upon thousands of these apps which means that thousands upon thousands of programmers are furiously coding and hoping that their app will be the next big thing.

From the story, The iPhone Gold Rush, we learned about Ethan Nicholas and his app, iShoot (we don’t know anymore about it than it’s name). Here’s what we found most interesting…

When the iShoot app was launched at $4.99, it sold enough copies to net him $1,000. On the second day, his take of the sales was about $2,000. Day 3, his portion of sales dipped to $50. Apparently, it stayed there for WEEKS.

So, guess what he did? He released a free version of the game with fewer features. Why? Because he thought that a taste of iShoot would get people hooked and cause them to pony up a few bucks for the paid version. Guess what? It was a success!.
The results:
iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times.
Lots of people have upgraded to the paid version
On its peak day, iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies (a $35,000 day)
He made $800,000 in five months

Do you have anything that you can give away as a sample? Anything that once people try they might find out they can’t live without? There are several ways to to this. It might be a free evaluation, that leads to a major consulting our outsourcing gig. Or, something smaller, with a lower price point that attracts a big crowd. Do you have anything that you would like us to post in the blog? Share with our audience in the FREEBIES section? Drop us a line at info[at]oddpodz[com] or leave it in the comments section below. You can also post it in the forum!

That’s an interesting mix of subjects that should resonate with most of our readers. I must admit, I’m starting to really enjoy this blogging thing. Sharing what I know and what I believe with a bunch of creative-minded biz friends is fun and challenging.

Blogging.
As I sit down at my keyboard tonight and begin to write this week’s posts I ponder about some things.

1) Should this blog and Oddpodz for that matter be more narrowly focused, our content, tools and offerings?
Today, we strive to give creative-minded business people and organizations, from a 1 person solo practice to a 500-person enterprise, good ideas, free tools and a network to find and connect with other valuable resources and people.

Is diversity a good thing? Or is a more laser-like target better? Please tell us what you think.

2) What does it take to build a power blog?
In general terms, we know it’s about good content, ongoing SEO efforts and participating in other high traffic communities and blogs. But what are the top 10 most powerful actions a blogger can do to significantly move the reader meter.

I’m going to post both of these questions in our forum and invite you to add your feedback. I’ve been using my Linkedin groups quite a bit to have discussions on a bunch of issues. I’ll be compiling these soon and sharing them with in Oddpodz.

Headlines.
It was my intention to next blog about my friend Dan Schawbel’s new book Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

Me 2.0 teaches people how to use social media tools for personal brand building and is the first book of this kind written for the millennials generation. I suppose us older folks can also learn from this book, since we often act like we are 30 something. The book is great and I will be posting a review in the book review section in the Oddpodz forum and will dedicate our Tues. blog to some of the book’s highlights and the topic of personal branding.

Sorry, I got side tracked.
As I was crafting my blog title on personal branding, I discovered a very cool, free tool that analyzes headlines for its emotion marketing impact. As you know, reaching your customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.

The Advanced Marketing Institute provides the free headline analysis tool.
The Advanced Marketing Institute is a group of researchers, educators, and developers who have come together to provide real tools and knowledge to businesses and individuals who are tired of struggling to control their chaotic systems.

How does the Headline Analyzer work?
Simple go to: Headline Analyzer

Type in your headline. It must be under 20 words. Hit analyze this.
Your headline will be analyzed and scored based on the total number of Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) words it has in relation to the total number of words it contains. This will determine the EMV score of your headline. In addition to the EMV score, You will find out which emotion inside your customer’s your headline most impacts:

Intellectual
Words which are especially effective when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation.

Empathetic
Words which resonate in with Empathetic impact often bring out profound and strong positive emotional reactions in people.

Spiritual
Words which are especially effective when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation. Words which resonate in with Empathetic impact often bring out profound and strong positive emotional reactions in people. Words which have the strongest potential for influence and often appeal to people at a very deep emotional level.

So I tested out a few headlines. There is no limit to how many headlines you can get feedback on.

Remember this title is for a blog post for Dan Schawbel’s new book,and other personal branding insight.

My first headline: Be a business magnet Project Authority Earn trust Win Contracts
My Headline’s EMV Score: 40%

My 2nd headline: How to be a business magnet, project authority, earn trust and win contracts today
My Headline’s EMV Score: 42.86%

My 3rd headline: Stop losing opportunities. Be your strongest business magnet, exude authority, earn trust and win more clients today My Headline’s EMV Score: 52.94%

This score indicates that my headline has a total of 52.94% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words. And for comparison, most professional copywriters’ headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines.

Yahoo, I’m gifted! For at least a few minutes.
This is a cool tool and gets you really thinking about how to write more emotionally charged copy. But for a blog title, it also has me thinking search engine results. So my recommendation is: Headlines should be short and include keywords, use the highest rated title as a subtitle.

In closing, what does constipation have to do with any of this?
Well for starters, brilliant comedians have been leveraging this writing technique for years. It’s called a triple. Two words are normal, expected and could go together. The last word is goofy, unexpected and some times shocking. Which makes the choice and combination of these three words so effective in getting attention and hopefully a laugh. You can use this method when you are speaking or writing.

Last week I talked about dealing with creative brain freeze, which could also be described as creative constipation. This week I’ve been jamming, pumping out ideas and enjoying my favorite things, writing, thinking and problem solving. If my thawing your brain tips and the free ebook on creative productive we recommended didn’t help, start reading Mark McGuinness’ blog, it’s amazing! Or, eat more fiber.

We gave you a list of reasons why having some FREE juicy business tidbits is a viable strategy back when we launched Free Biz Findz. If you missed that article, or were still skeptical, we have have further proof. While perusing our stack of daily online reading, we found this entry “The Business Case for Giving Away Your Best Work for FREE!” on Tom Peters’ blog. So, if you didn’t listen to us, we’re sure you might think twice now. Tom Peters also has a section on his site that is dedicated to giving any visitor to his site tons of FREE business know how. Despite giving away all this free “stuff” he still sells books, consults (to paying clients) and speaks (to paying audiences). The free stuff just enhances his brand as a business expert!

So, you still don’t believe it can work. We’ve heard all the arguments against FREE as a strategy. Two of the most frequently used are: 1)if something is FREE, people will regard it as lacking value, and 2) the recipient of the free info will be able to leverage the free tidbit into something of great financial value to themselves and that the author/creator of the the FREE item in question will not be rewarded. To both, we wholeheartedly disagree.

We don’t want you to give away all of your secrets and end up penniless. We know that you can use FREE as a viable business strategy. We’re pretty sure that everyone has some valuable bullet points, tips, graphics, videos, tutorials or insight that they can share without negatively impacting their own livelihood. If we’ve learned nothing else in our days in the branding, marketing and start-up worlds, we now know the following to be true: it’s all in the execution. It is unlikely that your primer on branding will allow a reader to go out and do a kick-ass job overhauling and relaunching a brand. So, if you have something that you can give away that positions you as an expert, people will probably remember you as such. Then, after they’ve read, seen, heard, interacted with what you’ve put out into the universe for FREE, they might just tap you to help them execute the next project or deal which you’ve proven you can readily tackle.

We are constantly compiling and reviewing the best of free biz stuff out there. Do you have a free offer that you would like us to review? Feel free to leave it in the comments section or send us an email at info[at]oddpodz[dot]com.

Free Biz Findz moves to Free Ideas section.
It’s FREE. That’s right, not much feels better than finding FREE, valuable products, services and resources to grow your business, especially when it’s delivered to your inbox.

In today’s competitive economy, FREE is more valuable than ever. Whether you are bootstrapping a start up business, trying to stretch your budget, or simply looking to find the right resources with a “try before you buy” offer, there is nothing better than FREE.

We make FREE biz findz easy, so you can invest your precious time in your business and not waste time digging through search engine results to find valuable offers for products and services to help you be successful.

How will the Oddpodz FREE biz findz work?

We will post new FREE findz every week.

They will include a mix of:
• 100% services, products, best Web sites, ebooks and other learning tools, along with
• carefully selected high-value, low-cost introductory offers that may have small fees associated with them.

We will always clearly label what is 100% FREE and what offers may have a small cost associated with them like shipping.

The Oddpodz team will investigate every single FREE biz find we post and we report on what we think. Have a suggestion for a FREE biz find you’ve experienced? Or do you or your business have something of value you can offer our community that’s FREE? Send us an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it If we think it’s worthy and valuable we’ll add it to our our list.