Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘General Business’ Category

I like to write about topics related to money, including ways of earning it and spending it. What I think I did not discuss yet is setting goals for your financial life. I believe that it is greatly beneficial to have some kind of plan when it comes to setting your goals. For example, one person might plan that he will retire at the age of 65 with a net worth of $300,000. Another person might have a short term plan to acquire $500 within one month for birthday presents. Whether we are talking about setting long term or short term goals, this kind of objectives will keep you focused, and it might be a lot easier for you to achieve your goals once they are clearly defined. That is because you will be dedicated to use your available resources to achieve those goals. Many people who are considered by many as rich or successful, claim that one of the reasons for achieving a financial success was setting goals. Many of you might say that due to the downtime economy it is difficult to set goals and achieve them because so many unpredictable things can happen. Companies fire employees almost all the time and if you have a job today, you might not have your job tomorrow. However, you can still try to set your goals, by making decisions not based on the fact if you have your regular job or not.

You do not have to store all your data on a disk to have access to it at all times. It will be even more convenient for you to store some of the more important data online. If your computer refuses to work or something else happens, you will be able to access your documents quickly from any other computer from an Internet cafe. To do this, the easiest way is to store your data in your email box. All you have to do is send an email to yourself. I have confirmed that it works with Gmail. Just click on Compose message or New message, type your own address, attach the desired files, and your email is ready to go. However, there is still another way you can protect your data. You do not have to necessarily attach them to your emails thanks to add-ons like Gmail Drive. Gmail Drive is a special add-on that you can have installed on your computer, and it can be quite useful in various situations. By copying your content to your Gmail Drive folder, the add-on will automatically send all its new content to your email account. There is absolutely no need for you to do it manually, as the add-on will take care of everything.

Duplicate content is something that every serious webmaster is trying to avoid. Basically, duplicate content means that some specific content, like an article, exists in a few locations on the Internet. Search engines often penalize websites for having duplicate content, as usually duplicate content provides a smaller value for Internet users. On the other hand, original content is something considered to be very valuable.

However, it seems that detecting duplicate content not always works as well as it should. From time to time, bloggers report that articles on their site has been marked as duplicate content, because scraper websites have copied those articles to their own domains. If the duplicate content filter was working correctly, then the scraper sites would be marked as sites with duplicate content, not the opposite. Generally speaking, scrapper sites are automated websites that pull content from other websites using web scraping. Most of those sites are made solely for Google AdSense. It is important to understand that many of them violate copyright law, as they do not even give credit to the original author. The webmasters of such sites do not put any work into writing articles, yet they might be listed quite high in search engine results.

Some speculate that many search engines fail to realize on which site the content was posted in the first place. The websites that copy/paste content from other sites, which are indexed earlier, might be actually treated as legit sites. While it is alarming, let us hope that the major search engines will work on those content filters, as we do not want our content copied/pasted to other websites. I hope that this article reminded all of us that original content is something we should strive for, and that copying copy/pasting content from other websites should be avoided at all cost.

There are many different types of business cards. Thousands of designs make it to the market each day and are available online as well as offline. You need business cards if you want your business to appear professional. Every time you meet a potential business partner, you need to give him something that will have your name, address, and phone number on it. Business cards, especially cheap business cards, make lives so much easier. Almost every businessman has a pile of them. Those people who try to run a business without business cards miss an important feature and part of being a businessman. When you want business cards, you want such business cards that will enable you to share your details with your customers and future business partners as soon as possible. The reason I am writing this is that every second of running a business without business cards might mean losses. Imagine that you met somebody with whom you would like to close a deal. You lack business cards. How are you going to tell that person who you are and what you do? You cannot write your name and address on a piece of paper, as it is not going to look professional.

Torrent engines allow the distribution of very valuable materials. A lot of them are non-copyrighted and perfectly legal for distribution, but unfortunately some of them are pirated materials. That is why from time to time major Hollywood Studios accuse torrent directories such as torrentspy.com of distributing pirated material. In case of torrentspy.com, they won the battle. The court ordered torrentspy.com to pay $110,970,000 for distributing 3,699 films and shows. In my opinion, this number is quite hilarious, as I doubt that torrentspy.com has more than a couple of thousand of dollars lying around. Having said that, it is a decisive victory for Hollywood Studios, and even though they will probably not receive this amount of money, they definitely made a point. This is a great example of how justice works.

There is a bit different situation with MPAA, which has been vigorously engaged in fighting piracy for many years. The question arises if lawsuits will really help them win this war. MPAA has filled a lawsuit against a site that allegedly profits from piracy by indexing and posting links to what is believed to be pirated content. What is really interesting about this case is that MPAA was giving away free publicity to a mostly unknown site. Many people flocked to this site, which I prefer not to mention, to check out the site and see what it offers. This was especially true as there was a risk that it could shut down permanently. This site might have actually benefited more from this lawsuit than it had to lose.
As you see, there are some battles won against distributors of illegal content. However, there are also some battles that are lost. It is important that companies choose their battles wisely, because they cannot win all of them.

You might have noticed that I use the terms conversions and impressions from time to time, but I might have not explained them properly. To begin with, those are terms often used in affiliate marketing. You might have heard advertisers who use Google Adsense to use these terms quite often. Impressions are the numbers signifying the amount of times the page with affiliate ads has been visited. Since it is easier to manipulate the impressions count then conversions, usually you are not going to be paid solely because of high amount of impressions. On the other hand, conversions signify how many visitors performed an action you were paid for. Conversion rate is usually lower than 10%, and as a matter of fact it is often even lower than 0.5%. Conversions are actually the ratio of sales to impressions. So, for example, a 10% conversion rate would indicate that 1 in 10 people who visited a specific website decided to make a purchase. Impressions and conversions are a very important part of a marketing strategy. There are many people who specialize in maximizing the conversion rate, and what they do is they try to attract as many visitors to a website as possible. The amount of conversions will also depend on the attractiveness of a website. If there are enough call to action buttons, a visitor is a lot more likely to make a purchase. As a result of this, there will be also more conversions.

Today I would like to write some words regarding the drop shipping technique on eBay. Let me tell those not familiar with the subject that drop shipping is a technique in which the seller does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders to wholesalers who ship the goods to the customer. Anyway, after researching drop shipping, I found that there are many scammers out there, or at least people that are using ethically questionable tactics. For example, there is a review site that rates drop shippers and the website is actually owned by the company that is rated as the best drop shipper. Of course, there are also some legitimate drop shippers. From what I have researched the easiest way to get a list of real drop shippers that would be interested in selling their items to a small owned business is to use the services of companies like WorldWideBrands. I would also want to list a few drop shippers that seem to have good reputation. The reason I want to do this is that while WorldWideBrands may be the easiest way to obtain a list of drop shippers, they charge around $250 for their services. So here is a list of drop shippers where you do not pay any account set-up fees:

moteng.com - More than 20,000 Sport & Camping & Name brand items
Wynit.com - More than 5000 name brand electronics
WholesaleDiscoveries.com - 1000’s of General Merchandise Items
Jewelrysprite.com - More than 5000 pieces Fine Jewelry
Petra.com - Electronic Accessories
TrademarkPoker.com - Poker Wholesaler/Dropshipper

Please note that usually legitimate drop shippers require the customer to provide a Federal Tax ID.

For those of you who like to check out new websites where you can make money online, I have another one that I would like to discuss today. It can be easily found at gazhoo.com. The aim of the site is to connect buyers and sellers, this time of documents, like reports, term papers, business, and legal forms, as well as market research forms. If you are in a possession of such documents and you are the original author of them, you can upload your material for somebody to buy it. I think that this website is a great place for writers, and for those who like to write things which they would like to share with others. I believe that there is nothing wrong with getting paid for your articles, term papers etc., as long as you are the author of them. I know that it might sometimes be difficult to recognize whether a person in reality is the author of a paper or a document. However, there are very effective ways on the Internet which enable us to check if the documents or papers are genuine or not. While submitting your work on the website, you will have a chance to set up your own price for the documents. A short description and the number of pages are also required for the potential buyers. The company pays through PayPal, and has a referral program that you can take advantage of.

The problem with working in an office is that you might not always be busy. And when a worker is not busy, he might be tempted to start looking for something to do, like surfing the Web, or writing emails. There are many people who just surf the Internet for fun during work, or use their email for other purposes then strictly work. According to the study conducted by AMA (American Management Association) among three hundred companies US companies more than a quarter of employees were fired because of misusing email, and every third worker has been let go for not using the Internet properly at work. Whereas accessing pornographic sites during working hours was the main reason for being fired for misusing the Internet, simply surfing the Web was the reason one third of the employees lost their employment. Office workers are also being downsized for the misuses of emails, mostly because of the inappropriate language used in correspondence. Twenty five percent of bosses said that they fired their staff because of excessive personal use of email.
I think that it is quite apparent that a worker should not access pornographic websites, or other sites considered to be offensive. When it comes to emails avoiding using vulgar language is another thing that employees should remember about. Workers should also realize that in order to have everything under control many companies monitor their Internet connections, and as a matter of fact, it has been said that 66% of companies monitor their Internet connections. In many cases companies do not even have to notify employees that their activity at the computer is monitored. Every employee should remember that and try to represent their company in the best way possible. Employees should also try to use their time effectively because they are usually paid on a per hour basis. Of course, employees also deserve privacy to some degree, so monitoring Internet connections may not be the best way to motivate employees to work more efficiently.

Alexa is a site which monitors the number of daily visitors to websites based on the Alexa toolbar. While there are some problems with this tool, it is believed to be accurate for the top 100 websites. However, it does not work reliably for measuring sites which are about technology. This is because visitors to technology sites tend to have Alexa toolbar installed on their computers, as opposed to non-technology related sites. In any case, I was not surprised to notice that search engines were among the most popular websites in the world. Among them was yahoo.com, google.com, and live.com. I believe that the reason that search engines are so popular is the fact that information is very valuable in our times, and search engines are considered the best way to obtain it. You can easily obtain information about recent events, movies, books, or anything you want. Search engines allow you to search for products which you want to purchase, and they are usually less expensive than those in than brick and mortal stores, as online merchants have lower costs. The best search engines in the world are even capable of correcting spelling mistakes, so that if you make a mistake, you will not have to enter the whole search phrase again. All of the things that I mentioned contribute to the fact that search engines became the most popular websites in the world.