I was recently nominated to join a local, fairly exclusive, “CEOs Club” where we meet once a month for dinner and have guest speakers from all around the “business building” spectrum.

Late last week was their second meeting (the first I attended) this year, I had no idea what to expect but was pleasently surprised.

The structure is that we all get there about an hour before dinner and stand around networking. After that we grab dinner and sit down to eat. As we’re eating, the guest speakers start presenting on the topic of the day - the presentations are about 1 - 1.5 hours.

The networking was obviously one of my favorite parts of the meeting - I got a chance to hear about some amazing companies and great ideas.

The actual “training” session was OK, I’d give it a 6 on a 1-10 scale, but I did learn a few things that I will blog over the next couple of days.

Here’s something I learned - Part 1 of a series I’ll do over the next few posts…

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Getting Bank Loans - Displaying TANGIBLE Value In The Intangible…

There was a veteran banker presenting and she mentioned something that I think is important for everyone to know. She said that many times banks prefer to back companies that have a lot of “physical” assets like equipment, etc…

This is because that equipment serves as “collateral” to the loan. However, this is a big issue for “internet” and many “technology” companies who’s biggest physical assets are a few computers.

In a situation like that, it truly is hard to get a bank line of credit. A tip she gave…

1. If you’re profitable - TELL THEM THAT. She said to make it very clear if you’re cash flow positive, they like that.

2. If you own “digital” assets - For example if you have a customer list, lead list, etc… These are still valuable things that the bank could sell if need be.

So if you have an internet business, don’t despair - you CAN still get a line of credit from a bank. It’ll just be harder and you’ll have to apply to more banks to find the right “understanding” banker.

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My real background comes from marketing and more specifically internet marketing, so as I build this blog out and other sites, I want to share some of my “smaller” marketing tactics with you. Maybe the $100 Million+ companies won’t care about this (although it can impact them too), but my guess is that most of our readers CAN benefit from this…

Thanks to a friend of mine (also on our team who handles all of our design), I got a tip from him recently to pay more attention to Digg.com. I always thought that for Digg.com to really help you, you have to already have THOUSANDS of visitors, but I now learn that that is not the case!

His basic recommendation: Set-up an account at Digg.com and digg my own posts, each one of them and then let it be.

So, starting yesterday, I have pretty much digged the 30 blog posts that are here at MysteryCEO.com right now. The results have been VERY interesting already! Below, I’ll share what I did and also the results…

Step 1: Go to www.Digg.com and sign-up for a free account, it takes about 1 minute!

Step 2: After logging in, go to: http://digg.com/submit/

Step 3: Copy/Paste the URL of the place the story exists, the exact link and choose what kind of media it is…

Step 4: Give it a title and description <– This is CRITICAL because it will determine how many people read or don’t read it.
** Make sure to use a catchy title and a short, to the point, but exciting description…

Step 5: Pick the right category - I have not played enough to see if you should be “tricky” with what category you pick, so for now just pick what makes sense!

Step 6: Prove that you’re human by typing in the letters you see and hit SUBMIT.

Step 7: Careful, you’re not done yet, Digg.com thinks that EVERY story is a repeat so they are double-checking, just scroll to the bottom and click “Original, I Swear!”

NOW, you’re done! That’s it, it was a few clicks and you’ll have presece on a major site. I’ve done this for about 1.5 days now, want to see my results?

First of all, here is how Awstats shows the increase in my traffic…

(Keep in mind that I’m showing this so quickly that the Awstats has not updated for today, so you’ll only see the jump it took yesterday, and I’ve spent time DIGGING today too…).

Now, let’s see the jump that Google Analytics also shows in my traffic from just 1.5 days of Digging my existing content…

Here is the other neat thing, OTHER people actually are liking my story and taking time to digg it themselves, THIS I did not expect…now it’s not a LOT, but it’s something! This is the beginning of building more and more…

Pretty cool eh! This also gives me a chance to see what others like and don’t…

So, this is all I have for today, if your company is already posting content to the site, make sure you have someone doing this for you. As soon as I figure this out, I’m going to assign it to someone here to do it for me every day. Also, I’ll keep doing it for a week and report back on the results I am getting…

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