What can you learn about business from a children's movie? You can learn some great entrepreneurial lessons from the recent film "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" starring Johnny Depp.

WARNING -Spoiler Alert- If you have not seen the movie (or the older version) yet, this article may give away a few elements of the story that could reduce your enjoyment of the film. You can always come back and read it after you have seen the picture.

Marketing

"Find 1 of 5 Golden Tickets in a Willy Wonka product and be one of the first people in a long time to visit the magical chocolate factory. Also, one kid will win a special prize that will exceed your wildest imagination."

This is an excellent promotion. It sparks interest in Willy Wonka products, builds brand awareness, and most importantly; it significantly increases sales. The media picks up on the promotion and generates a tremendous amount of free publicity. Word of mouth referrals help spread the promotion to areas that were untouched by newspapers and television.

Positive Thinking

There are many "naysayers" who discourage the main character, Charlie, from getting his hopes up about finding one of the lucky Golden tickets. Negative thinking can be devastating, especially to a child. However, Charlie does not take heed of the negativity. Supported by his Grandmother's constant reassurance, Charlie keeps a positive outlook and believes that he has as good a chance as any other kid to find one of the five tickets.

Don't Quit

Charlie refuses to give up on his dream of finding a ticket. After he doesn't find one on his first, and probably only, attempt - he doesn't quit. Charlie believes that he will get one of those tickets. Providence provides two more opportunities and amazingly, Charlie finds the last ticket! This is especially significant because it had been falsely reported that all of the tickets had been found.

A Good Support Network

Charlie has an excellent support network. Although very poor in financial terms, Charlie is very rich in family. He lives in a loving environment and appreciates every member of his household. He selflessly offers to sell his ticket to provide some much needed cash for his family, instead of taking the special chocolate factory tour. His family will have nothing of it and encourages him to pursue this once in a lifetime opportunity.

When Willy Wonka offers to make Charlie his heir, Charlie refuses because accepting the offer would mean that he probably would never see his family again. Willy Wonka later makes the offer again, but allows Charlie to bring his family this time. Charlie's family then extends its hospitality to Mr. Wonka and he ends up gaining the positive and supporting network that he had needed as well.

Four Good Lessons

If you are an entrepreneur or are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, remember these lessons from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". It takes good marketing, positive thinking, and a good support network to get started. Most importantly, don't quit - your success may be only one candy bar away.

Michael Paetzold is the owner of MP Marketing and specializes in helping people to earn an income on line. You may reach him at mike@mpaetzold.com.

News of interest

Once again another improvement from my favorite ad tracker Hits Connect.  (Remember that as a subscriber you can save 30% through that link.)  Not only do they offer the ad tracking and a rotator but now they will also track your Ad Sense clicks and the page views of the sites that you have Ad Sense on.

The gentlemen at Focus 4 the Future will be sponsoring a Thanksgiving "No Limits" Seminar in Charlotte, NC the weekend before Thanksgiving.  The speaker list is phenomenal and I have already made plans to attend.  If you want to get to meet and learn from people that are extremely successful check it out.

Speaking of Focus 4 the Future.  They offer Focus 4 points and I have decided to start offering them in some of my promotions.  This program an on line Green Stamps type loyalty program.  You collect the points and can convert them into different products or services that they have.  As a thank you for being a subscriber here are some for you.  This is something that you may think of using in your own promotions to set your offer apart from other people.  You can sign up for an advertisers account here.  (Just a note - The link for Focus4 points is only good for 3 days so if you are late opening this or reading it in the archives it may have expired.)

Program Updates

Profit Rally - I am extrenmely excited about the changes coming to Profit Rally.  Axel will be adding a web tools script for Pro members any day now.  Having seen and played with this script it makes it extremely easy for anyone to create a professional web site, add Google Ad Sense adds in, offer Amazon products,  have a blog attached and even draw content from your Profit Rally and Quickadz accounts that will be viewable on your site and even spiderable.

Kiosk - Now offering the ability to host up to 8 domains on their Platinum account with a conference room, access to their new web design tool and much more.  Add in their support (absolutely first rate) and training along with their other features and you can't go wrong.

Empowerism - About ready to remove my recommendation for this.  They did something with their password system and still trying to get logged in.   Going to put this program on a hold status despute being a money maker.

Niche Marketing Tools

Infogoround - Continues to be an excellent source of private label articles.  This and blogger together can allow you to create a niche site with very little effort, minimal HTML knowledge and quite quickly all for $24.95 a month.  To see how this can work for you check out this article here.

Click Spy - Knowing which of my niche sites are getting Google clicks, which Click Bank, Amazon, Commission Junction and Link Share links on which pages are being clicked is invaluable.  If you are building niche sites this tool is invaluable.

X Site Pro - Just started using this tool this past week.  Actually, this is part of why this newsletter is a bit late.  This is a phenomenal tool.  It allows me to update my various sites with a point and click feature.  Ad Google Ad Sense ads or links anywhere on a page with automatic wrap around.  It will create a Google site map for your site and an actual site map for your site with no effort on your part.  It checks each page and gives you seo tips.  All in all despite being a bit pricey I have found it more than worth it if you are serious about creating niche sites.

Blogs and RSS Feeds

Last month I talked about Blog Etiquette.  This month I want to talk about using blogs to get your site spidered.  This is an excellent way to let the search engines know you have made changes.

Start by signing up at Blogger and create a blog for your site. Every time you update the site add a blog post that has a link to your site and the new page with a short description. Click here for an example.  The reason for using Blogger is that they are owned by Google and this will get Google to come lookinbg at your new changes almost immediately.  (I have seen them show up at a brand new site within 15 minutes of me posting about it there.)

To really make this effect though you need to add your site feed from this blog to your my.Yahoo page and your my.MSN page. Both of those are free to get.

The third step is to go to Pingomatic and ping your blog each time that you update it.  This will tell Yahoo and MSN that you have made changes and you will usually see them show up in a day or two.

If you have any questions on this drop me a line - mike@mpaetzold.com

Thats all for this month and feel free to contact me if I can help you on any way.

Have a great month and thanks for being a subcscriber.

Michael Paetzold
938 E Center Street
Mahanoy City, PA  17948

01-610-871-0546