July 28

Websites Created July 28, 2010

Armoire Furniture

http://www.armoire-furniture.com

 

Bedroom Furniture

http://www.bedroom-furniture-sets.net

 

Buy Land

http://www.buy-land.info

 

Buy or Sell Home

http://www.buy-sell-home.net

 

Chandeliers and Lighting

http://www.chandelier-lighting.info

 

Metal Detector Central

http://www.metaldetectorcentral.net

 

My Pillar Candles

http://www.mypillarcandles.com

 

Outdoor Patio Furniture

http://www.outdoor-patio-furniture.org

 

The Candleholder

http://www.thecandleholder.com

 

Website Designers Online

http://www.websitedesignersonline.net

8:17 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

July 26

Squeeze Pages increase Conversion Rates for Lead Signups as Part of an Internet Marketing Strategy
Squeeze pages increase conversion rates for lead sign-ups.  This has been proven in practice and can be made to work for you.

A squeeze page is very simple.  A squeeze page is a single page not linked to other pages.  When a user arrives at a squeeze page through a search there is only one action that can be taken.  This action is to sign up and provide contact information.

More information is offered in exchange.  These pages must be enticing by providing information of interest and by providing no opportunity for the user to click on other tabs or links to leave the page without providing their information first.

This is why it is important to try to direct traffic to a squeeze page when you have traffic to direct from other sources.


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Major Lead Generation Tools on the Internet for Real Estate
Real estate businesses can gain traffic and leads primarily through:

1. Videos.
2. Articles.
3. Twitter.
4. RSS.
5. Pay Per Click Advertising.
6. Social Networking.
7. Hub Sites.
8. Social Bookmarking Sites.
9. Backlinks.

Like all tools, these require finess.  These are merely tactics and useless unless coordinated synergistically into a powerful strategy for domination of the marketplace one targets.  How to understand a particular marketplace and how to derive the strategy is very interesting but beyond the scope of this post.


8:56 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

Marketing as it fits into the Real Estate Business
These are the high level categories of areas of your real estate business which must be analyzed and optimized for success. 

• Marketing Systems
• Acquisition Systems
• Loss Mitigation
• Finance Systems
• Sales Systems
• Property Managemsnt
• Business Management Systems
• Business Development
  

8:52 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

The importance of your perception by others as a "Thought Leader"
At Fortune Builders iInvest 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida. I heard repeatedly by a variety of experts the importance of the perception of an individual and the perception of a business as a thought leader. 

The interesting idea I heard a few times which stuck with me was that one does not have to be an expert to be a thought leader.  One can have an opinion or interview experts to discover this and become a thought leader that way.  Sometimes being a thought leader is just a matter of calling attention to an issue and engaging people on the topic.

The importance of this is credibility.  People and businesses must be actively involved in the issues affecting their industries to gain the best customers.  What constitutes "best customers" is another interesting topic but beyond the scope of this post.


8:49 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

Conversion Rates: A Metric for the Success of Internet Lead Sources
The conversion rate is a direct measurement of:

The Number of Goals Achieved
________________________
       The Number of Visits

There are two types of conversion rates that must be measured for marketing purposes on the Internet. 

• Conversions from Visitors to Leads
  
  
• This metric is expressed as the number of visits you need to a page to result in one sign up on your E-Mail list.
  
  
• Use as few fields as possible for data collection to prevent drop rate of people too frustrated to finish filling out your form. Ideally use two:  Name and E-Mail. This is all you use to send a follow-up E-Mail.
  
  
• Use a professional E-Mail service that provides subscription compliance, E-Mail archiving, a push to Twitter, and agreements with ISPs to protect against spam in exchange for delivery to the inbox instead of to junk mail or dropped delivery.
  
  
• Conversions from Visitors to Sales.

• Measure your shopping cart sales results (number of sales) and divide this by the number of visits. 

Additionally, though not an Internet metric, a business should also track the ratio of Sales to Leads.




8:43 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

Real estate success is always determined by the number of leads you get. Discuss.
The more leads you get the more you make.  Success is always based on hard statistics.  The number of contacts you have are the number of leads, as long as they are truly viable as leads.  Of these, a certain number will purchase, and a certain number will indicate no interest.  For a real estate software package to be good, one has to be able to measure the opportunities, the sales stage the lead is on, the likelihood in percent of successfully closing and collecting, and the dollar amount of the opportunity.  Over time and with experience, these become sales projections and income projections and can lead the user to a better understanding of where your business is going.  After a full year I believe you can start your own revenue forcasts to an accuracy of perhaps 80% +- 7%.  This is based on research on my use of CRM software at two Ivy League universities.  The implementation team I was on previously had predicted over 95% accuracy, but in real estate I believe there are factors not accounted for at the present time which make the possible accuracy at least ten percent lower.  Even at the range of 73% to 87% accuracy for your real estate income forecasts, businesses will have a very powerful tool to predict which people and business entities are profitable leads and by tracking the sources of these leads one can determine which marketing activities are the most profitable.  From this drift analysis can be made with visual tools to provide decision making ability to business leaders.  Determining the profitability of various marketing activities was stated in the Fortune Builders iInvest 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida.

Customer relationship management software needs to be included which is fully integrated into the enterprise resource plan (ERP) of the firm. 


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April 08

Windows 7 is more stable and quick than Windows Vista
Windows Vista added a lot of great visual elements on top of the latest build of the Windows XP Core at one time.  Suppose you have between four and seventy windows open on your computer at once.  Vista added great functionality with Aero.  The AeroPeek sub feature of Aero is the most useful part of all, allowing one to see thumbnails of all of the windows and switch between them simply by waving the mouse pointer over the taskbar and then gesturing to the desired thumbnail.  This greatly speeds switching between screens.  Writing on your computer with Microsoft Word, blogging, performing internet research, watching internet TV, chatting, doing homework, using spreadsheets, working on company databases, and performing accounting functions are all contributers to having many windows that you will need to switch back and forth between quickly.

However for this nice new feature in Vista and a few other minor visual changes and sub features, the Vista core is hardly different from Windows XP Service Pack 3.  Windows XP was an excellent operating system back in 2002, but in the years between then and the release of Vista, the Windows XP Core, or basic standard code that runs the operating system, had been getting big and bloated.  The reason is Windows Update.  Everyone familiar with Windows has seen the notification, but what you may not realize is that these updates are patches adding new features to the existing core.  Many of these features add brand new services to Windows.  A service is a small program which runs in the background.  Every version of Windows is a set of running processes, and the more processes Windows has to run at a time, the slower your computer will go.    So Vista took all of the processes of bloated XP, then added several services to serve up Aero and multimedia and high quality audio. 

So now we get into what makes Windows 7 faster.  Windows 7 takes all of the great visual elements and multimedia features of Vista and runs them on a leaner and meaner core.  Less spyware and viruses make your computer faster also.  I have many clients who are not using traditional antivirus programs at all.  Antivirus can slow your computer down.  If you set a strong password for your administrator accounts in Windows, it is very hard for anything to install itself on your computer, which is how infections happen.  Rather more people get adware than viruses with Windows 7, as in previous editions of Windows.  Adware is best protected with vigilant use of free utilities available, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion and will merit a separate topic in future. The main reason for greater speed however  is that many of these Windows Services from Vista's Core were repackaged into fewer and more efficent, re-written code.  Less services means a smaller operating system core and less resources and memory being consumed by the Operating System.

---

Evidence:

Tests on machines running side-by-side have shown  how much faster, I.E. P.C. Magazine's test:

Window 7 vs. Windows Vista

Dell Laptop with 3GB DDR3 RAM	Windows Vista, 64-bit	Windows 7, 64-bit	Percent Improvement
Startup (in seconds)	52.7	45.5	13.7
Shutdown (in seconds)	10	10	0
Video rendering (in minutes:seconds)	1:31	1:20	12.1
SunSpider (Firefox 3.5)	1,437	1,238	13.8
Geekbench 2.1	2,778	2,792	0.5
PCMark Vantage	3,850	4,418	14.8

Read More...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354433,00.asp

SlashDot had a report that the difference was barely noticeable, however since they did not even track any statistics the author's editorializing tactics lack the credibility of PC magazine's report.

Read More...

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/07/1338206

The Wall Street Journal stated that Windows 7, "Leaves Vista in the dust".

Read More...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123258632983004629.html

Maximum PC did a number of benchmark tests and states that, "Finally, Microsoft releases a successor worthy of Windows XP".

 

Most of our application benchmarks measure either multi-threaded CPU performance (Main Concept, ProShow), hard drive performance (PC Mark Vantage), or a real-world mixture of the two (Photoshop, Premiere). In all of our application benchmarks, Windows 7’s performance was within a stone’s throw of XP.

It’s also worth noting that in several of our tests Vista was actually a big winner, thanks to performance enhancements that hit in Vista Service Pack 2.

Network

One of the main problems with Windows Vista prior to Service Pack 1 was poor network performance. Well, we’re happy to say that the days of waiting for files to copy across a network are done. Check the benchmarks and see for yourself—Windows 7 is stupid-fast at transferring files across a network.

 

Games

To test gaming performance, we ran a mix of DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 benchmarks on both ATI and Nvidia hardware. It’s important to remember when checking these scores, you shouldn’t be comparing ATI to Nvidia and vice versa. Instead, you should compare ATI’s and Nvidia’s respective scores on the different platforms to see who has the best drivers for Windows 7. 

 

In DirectX 10 benchmarks, both ATI and Nvidia chalked up almost identical scores in Vista and Windows 7. That’s to be expected, given that both companies are using a universal driver in Vista and Windows 7. That is, the driver in Windows 7 and Windows Vista are essentially the same.

However, everything changes when you get to DirectX 9 benchmarks. Depending on the benchmark, Windows 7 ranged from about 10% faster to about 10% slower than Windows Vista. What you gain in one benchmark, you lose in another. And, over the entire range of our DirectX 9 tests, everything ended up even.

 

For gamers, especially those currently using Windows XP, there’s a strong reason to upgrade to Windows 7. You may sacrifice a little performance in some games, but you’ll gain some in others, and you’ll have the ability to run DirectX 10 and 11 apps in their full glory, which will never be possible in Windows XP. We’re also confident that both ATI and Nvidia will continuously work to improve gaming performance in the future, as both companies have for every other new OS Microsoft has released.

Read More...

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/windows_7_review?page=0%2C0 



10:04 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

September 19

Wikipedia: What is is and What it is Not
Wikipedia can be good as a topic overview. However it is not appropriate as a work to cite as a reference.  If you have several related subtopics there is some value in going to Wikipedia if you understand the purpose for which it is  most effectively used.

Wikipedia's primary purpose is understood most commonly to be an online  encyclopedia, with quick, factual information you can trust.  However Wikipedia was never intended that way and has a hidden strength which you can use.   Wikipedia is a social collaborative brainstorming experiment on a worldwide scale.  Wikipedia articles have to be read with an understanding of the bias.  The information content in and of itself has no scholarly value.  Wikipedia itself admits that subtle misinformation is regularly placed there.  People look to Wikipedia for something that it does not attempt to be.  What it does attempt to create through its extensive network of internal links, a user-created categorization and linking of different ideas and concepts.  I go to Wikipedia to see the interrelatedness of all things.  If I visit a Wikipedia page, I don't read the article, I look for the out on the left hand side of the screen for the link entitled, "what links here".  All topics citing that topic are shown, and I can sometimes see patterns in the data  by pondering all of the marvelous things that people attribute a connection to what I just looked up.  This system of links that connect all of the different entries is known as the Semantic Web.  Eventually tools like Wikipedia will become interfaces to a tremendous database listing all public, and to licensed users private data as well, of all of the world's information.  Savvy decision-makers will come to power in the coming decades with one common trait: that they will be able to correctly assess patterns in important data and correlate them with a sufficiently sophisticated world view that they will be able to quickly act to their best advantage making rapid, well-informed, mathematically precise business, political, and military decisions.  The system of categories in Wikipedia which all link  to each other is known to librarians as a User Defined Category System or Folksonomy. This Folksonomy, being updated by people from diverse backgrounds, provides links between ideas and concepts as understood by mankind. This is what we can learn from Wikipedia and how the articles can best be used.

9:24 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

March 19

Windows 7

Windows 7 may not be in stores yet, only I have been testing out the beta product all over town. The preliminary results are very promising!

I started testing Windows 7 in March. I have installed it in many computers which were already running Vista, and I have also put it on desktops and laptops running XP.

The security features of Windows 7 are such that I have run a few desktops without an anti-virus program as an experiment. Neither computer was infected.

Both computers are now running AVG Anti-Virus. I have other computers running Avast Anti-Virus as well. Both of these programs are free. I have had good results with both of these programs for the Community Alliance Group at http://settleestate.com

There are also many other free utilities which work on Windows 7.

Overall there are fewer processes running and I have less driver issues than with Windows XP or Vista. However some programs crash unexpectedly, and Internet Explorer 8 has caused unexpected problems for my clients with page rendering on the Web and Web-Application performance.

7:35 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)