Everyone figures out that there are no barriers of entry, and social media promotion quickly turns into a massive spam machine. There are so many social messages going out daily through various media, that folks are beginning to feel overwhelmed, and they are tuning out and opting out.

This is a sigalert to business managers. They want to get their message out — not get tuned out.

What can we do about this dilemma?

Well, the best answer is: Be careful what you say and how you say it!  Readers often don’t get the message you think they are getting. In their minds, they read what they want to hear, not necessarily what you said. People may take a quick look at whatever message you are trying to get them to read and immediately abandon it, and you, forever. On the other hand, they may be interested, or even intrigued by the subject they perceive in your message.  Notice that word perceive.

Newsletters, for example, offer an opportunity to build a sender-reader relationship with customers, friends, and prospective customers. And we all know that you need to build relationships in order to build readership and to turn prospective customers into customers. Good newsletters are very powerful, whether printed and mailed, or e-mailed.

Sending out ads via email is quite different from sending out newsletters. Unfortunately many business owners/managers fail to realize this. They sign up for an email newsletter campaign, write or supervise the production of one or two ads to send out, and then give up, disappointed that the email newsletter campaign is “not working”. Of course its not working. Nobody wants to be sold anything.

A good newsletter, or a good tweet, or a good Facebook entry, or a good blog entry is quite simply one that provides information of interest to the reader. The most successful newsletters convey lots of information of interest and soft pedal the sales pitch. A good target is a 60/40 mixture or better. The more genuine information vs. advertising, the better the email newsletter campaign performs. Interestingly enough, the information portion need not relate to the advertising message in any way whatsoever. Humor is consistently the best-read section.

In the article, all the rest of the books mentioned were hard cover or paperback.  Mine was the only E-book.  P.S. It’s on sale at 50% discount this week only at Smashwords.

The discount is in honor of Read An Ebook Week.

Have you ever really examined a dollar bill?  Take one out and look at it. The one dollar bill design shown here first came off the government presses in 1957.  It is a note – a Federal Reserve Note signed by the U.S. Treasurer and Secretary of the Treasury.

No Intrinsic Value - Today, however, like the currency of most nations, the dollar is fiat money without intrinsic value.  This means that it has no backing   (the gold standard was abolished in 1972) and would be entirely worthless but for the fact that people have been persuaded to use and accept it as if it had worth.

Not Paper – Although most of us call it paper money, it is not paper.  It is in fact made of a blend of cotton and linen, with tiny  red and blue silk fibers running through it.  It can be washed without falling apart. The formula of the ink is kept secret.

Symbols – The bill is overprinted with symbols and then starched to make it water resistant.  Finally it is  pressed to give it that nice crisp look when it is new.  Of course, after usage, it is no longer crisp.

On the front of the bill, you will see the United States Treasury Seal to the right of George Washington’s picture.  In the center of the seal is a set of scales. Some say this represents a balanced budget.  In the center the image of a carpenter’s square is superimposed.  The Key to the United States Treasury is underneath.

The back side of the dollar bill is replete with symbolism.

The First Continental Congress requested that Benjamin Franklin and a group of men come up with a Seal representing the United States of America.  It took them four years to accomplish this task and another two years to get  it approved. You will see two circles. The circles comprise the front and back of the Great Seal of the United States. The pyramid in the left-hand circle is the object of much speculation.   Its front is lighted, and the western side is dark.  Some say this signifies that the United States was just beginning to develop as a nation, and we had not begun to explore the West.  The pyramid is uncapped, again signifying that we were not even close to being finished.

Inside the capstone is the all-seeing eye, an ancient symbol for divinity. It was Franklin’s belief that one man couldn’t do it alone, but a group of men, with the help of God, could do anything.  Although modern activists have succeeded in removing the phrase In God We Trust from many public places, it remains on the dollar bill, and the Latin above the pyramid,  Annuit Coeptis, means God has favored our undertaking. The Latin below the pyramid, Novus Ordo Seclorum, means a new order has begun. At the base of the pyramid is the Roman Numeral for 1776: MDCCLXXVI.

The Presidential Seal - The right hand circle is on every National Cemetery in the United States, and it is also the centerpiece of most heroes’ monuments.  Slightly modified, it is the Seal of the President of the United States, and it is always visible whenever he speaks.  Yet very few people know what the symbols mean.

The Eagle - The bald eagle was selected as a symbol for victory, for two reasons: First, he is not afraid of a storm; he is strong, and he is smart enough to soar above it. Secondly, he wears no material crown.  We had just broken from the King of England.  Also, notice the shield is unsupported.  This country could now stand on its own.

Congress - At the top of that shield the white bar signifies congress, a unifying factor. We were coming together as one nation. In the eagle’s beak you will read  E Pluribus Unum, meaning one nation from many people. Above the eagle are thirteen stars, representing the thirteen original colonies, and any clouds of misunderstanding rolling away.  Again, we were coming together as one. Notice what the eagle holds in his talons. He holds an olive branch and arrows, denoting peace and war.  This country wants peace, but we will never be afraid to fight to preserve that peace.

13 – Is it an unlucky number or a very significant number on the dollar bill?

You will usually never see a room numbered 13 at any hotel  or motel. No floor is called the 13th floor. But think about this:  13 original colonies, 13 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 13 stripes on our flag, 13 steps on the pyramid, 13 letters in the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, 13 stars above the eagle, 13 bars on that shield, 13 leaves on the olive branch, 13 fruits, and if you look closely, 13 arrows.

Although the E-Book Reader was invented almost 40 years ago at the Xerox research center near Palo Alto, it’s only been lately that the hand-held reading devices have begun to become “mainstream” – mostly because of new developments in the display screens.

The Kindle, by Amazon, started the race.  Now there are more than a dozen viable competitors to Kindle.  The Sony Reader, the Apple Reader, and most notably the new Barnes & Nobel NOOK are already giving almighty Amazon a real run for its money.  A dozen more models from Best Buy and other manufacturers are available right now.  Thin and lightweight, they all let you read books online, anywhere, picking up their signal from the Wireless Internet.

Sales are skyrocketing, and hundreds of thousands of new books are available for downloading and reading, at amazingly low cost.

Google makes public domain books available for free.  Many wanabe new authors publish their works online for free – no cost to the author, no cost to the reader.  Novels, non-fictions, textbooks, instruction manuals, business how-to books, and children’s books are waiting for you to press a button and wait only a few seconds for your book to appear – yours to keep, stored in the handheld reader.

I just published my latest book on this medium.  It’s called How to Graduate from Self Employment. You can sample the book on your PC or on most of these new E-book readers.  You will find copious mention of it on Google and Bing.

I plan to publish my recent paperback novel No More An Island online before Thanksgiving.  It will remain available as a printed book.  My plan is to publish the Graduate book as a paperback also, if it demonstrates a market.

To read about and sample the Graduate book, Click Here.