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Thursday, 04 June 2009 |
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When designing a website it's important to think about the subconscious thoughts and feelings that colors evoke.
Quick list of color associations:
- Blue = Security, Safety
- Red = Power
- Purple = Royalty
- Yellow = Caution, Cowardice
Interesting article about color meaning: http://www.squidoo.com/colorexpert
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Saturday, 05 April 2008 |
Have trouble finding an old email or document?  How frustrating it is! It used to happen to me more then I would like to admit. Not so anymore with Google Desktop. Even if you can still manage finding your stuff Google Desktop will help you find it faster (I promise). I not a huge Google fan now that it's a behemoth but It's such a helpful program I couldn't help but write about it- just in-case you didn't know. If you haven't downloaded Google Desktop do so now it's that helpful.
I mostly use it to find old emails with new registration information or business contact information. It's nice because in the GD search results you can click on the preview button and read the whole email if you want or you can click on a link to open it in it's native program.
Setting the Preferences:
Click to see full size image
Once downloading you'll want to set the preferences to remove the annoying sidebar. There's also some other cool things you can set like indexing by file-type and where not to index. You can also integrate it to show up on the top of your Google web search results. Looking at the additional plug-ins is probably worth a minute. I found a plug-in that would index OCR'd PDF documents.
If you download it let me know what you think!
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Sunday, 30 March 2008 |
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The purpose of this article is to document the low costs of direct mail campaigns and to show off my latest postcard campaign design.
I like postcards over envelope or tabbed mailings because they have the highest conversion rate. How many times have you thrown out an enveloped solicitation without even looking at it? With postcards you can't help but at least look at the images and then you often can get sucked into the copy. Drat!
What's cool about Postcard Campaigns:
- Postage and print cost is not as expensive as you might think (see table).
- Postcard size doesn’t increase postage. 3” X 5” & 6” X 11” postcards have the same postage cost.
- You have your target markets undivided attention.
- It’s tangible- customers can take it and possibly share it with friends.
- High quality 4-color prints show your product or service in it's the best light.
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| Cost |
Total |
EA. |
| Print |
$195.55 |
$0.10 |
| Mailing Service |
$99.00 |
$0.05 |
| Postage |
$470.18 |
$0.25 |
| Total |
$764.73 |
$0.40 |
| Notes: 1866 pieces sent to current customers. Shipping cost was slightly skewed by postage to Canada and Mexico (.69 cents per piece). |
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Click to see larger image
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Click to see larger image
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Thursday, 20 March 2008 |
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Did you know that search engines index pages with and without the "www" (i.e. www.blah.com and blah.com)? Although, they appear the same Google sees them as two separate pages. Unfortunately, it means your diluting your link popularity and possibly getting penalized for duplicate content. Don't throw your hands up in disgust just quite yet, luckily there's an easy solution.
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Create a text file called htaccess.txt.
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Copy and paste the code below into it.
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Replace "yoursitename.com" to your domain name.
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Upload the file to the root directory (usually public_html or something similar)
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Friday, 14 March 2008 |
Newsflash: Customers love email newsletters!
Do you know who else loves them? Newegg and TigerDirect.
Informal Case Study:
Being the market maven that I am my favorite newsletters are served up from electronic retail giants www.newegg.com and www.tigerdirect.com. Usually, these guys send at least one newsletter a day. What generally happens? I study it to see the latest and greatest deals and click on the links to learn more about the products. In fact, the majority of the time I visit their websites is via a newsletter link. Not to mention the last 8 of 10 electronics purchases I've made were from these two companies (easily over $2,000 in sales).
Result: The newsletter campaigns have increased website traffic, search rank, and most importantly sales.
What’s so great about email newsletters?
Email newsletters save customers time by delivering requested content right to their inbox. For me, it also serves as a reminder to check out the latest and greatest computer and electronic deals.
Email Newsletters
Email Newsletters are customized bits of information delivered right to your inbox.
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