Whooah-Biz

I was just listening to radio four where the conversation was focusing on loan sharks. Loan sharking has increased significantly in the last six months due to the current economic crisis, as it usual does. I do have a lot sympathy for people who find themselves in difficult times. I was rather impressed by some of the ideas talked about to help people handle their finances better. In fact I think the model can be use by anyone entrepreneurs included.

The ideas that was talked about on the program was that you can loan as much as you can borrow. So if you save 6 pounds a week from now until Christmas you will have saved £150 pounds. This bank/corporation will than lend the some amount to the person over the Christmas period enabling them to cover some of the extra cost Christmas brings.

The theory is if you can encourage responsible saving you can than encouraged responsible lending. Will the Labour goverment do the same with our current debt or go over the 60/40 rule. What do you think?

Yesterday some one asked what would be the expected return on every dollar I spend on marketing. It made me think. I know that when one looks at sales you are looking at about a conversion ratio of about 15 percent. That is quite different when you are talking about sales leads. A lot of marketing is more indefinable and more about feel than any metrics one can apply to it. Still one has to make a decision. According to Derek Lowe at Courant he talks about 24 percent of medical cost is spent on Marketing. Which seems to be quite high considering that I can only tell you the name of about 4 or 5 pharmaceutical companies. Obviously this industry is doing highly expensive targeted marketing. There are some exceptions most notable Viagra.

So what should you be looking to spend on Marketing? 25 percent of your future income should it be enough?

The next question is how do you spend it?

Do you spend it on printed media, internet media, video media, corporate entertainment, or the new kid on the block social media.

What do you think?

I have recently been caught in the domain name game. I wanted to buy some small domain names, ones that are easy to write like wcx.com or delight.biz. In this process I discovered a number of things about where the market is for domain names. It appears there are a number of companies and individuals who have come with the questionable idea of buying all the domain names they can within certain category. So for example Ron Jackson has brought as many as he can 3 letter and four letter domain names with .org .biz .com. So if I wanted to buy a domain name www.40c.com which is Owned by his company Internet Edge, Inc. I would have to email him and make him an offer. Which I did.

I wanted to buy delight.biz I got a very nice email back from Ron informing me that I should make an offer. So I did I offered him $100 he than replied that he would only be interested in a sum around $1500. Which made me think. What’s in a name? Some say that names can be fortuitus. I wonder for example what did ebay mean or Amazon before the dot.com era. The first is made up and the second a jungle in South America. Was it the name that made these companies successful or the product. I will leave you to decide.

Having the perfect domain does not guarantee you success or an income. If the domain name you are searching is lucky enough to have a holding page it still has a value of nil in terms of traffic or internet relevance. Google will not be directing any traffic to this domain. To gain any relevance in the search engine fields you will need to make it special create something unique and wonderful and that takes TIME and MONEY.

A couple of my clients have chosen very long domain names. On the internet I do not think it really matters. So long as you engage you visitors. If you succeed at that they will bookmark or RSS you and more importantly return. Believe me if somebody is interested by something they will insure they get it.

Web business is not about getting 200, 000 visitors who and came go. It is about achieving your goals. If your goal for example is to sell 10 web design projects than all you need is hundred of the correct visitors looking for a design company.

Post script: 1

It also interesting to note that if you have a brand and some body has taken your domain name. You can apply to www.internic.com who will send them packing if they think they are cyber squatting.

Post script: 2

With new domain names coming out all the time one should be able to find there desired name in one of the new veriants. mx.com, me, etc at 123-reg which I use.

For the longest time I could not understand spam. I failed to see the benefits of a promised breast enlargements or a new Gold watch that is not offered on Amazon. To put it frankly I considered it a total waste of everybody’s time. Why did some yo-yo sit there comprising emails that make no sense with links that would never be clicked upon or is that the case?

For the average educated person one can assume there is no interest in spam. The Spam market is for the poorly educated who most probably have little or no education. It is this type of user who is the most susceptible to this type of marketing. (third world countries) Unfortunately the spammer cannot differentiate from the email address the country of origin. (maybe we should start using country domains on our emails)

Spam exists because it does achieve it objects. 17 percent of the emails sent out will be clicked upon on and presumable a slightly smaller percentage will buy the products offered.

Of course due to the low cost of this form of marketing it is very attractive marketing for certain products. I was going to write companies here but I know any western company caught associating with this would face legal proceedings.

There is millions of pound spent on anti spam software, hundreds of thousand man hours on security. Is it effective? Well yes intill we have the next round where it starts again each side trying to better the other in spam wars.

So how do we defeat Spam? Educate People so that they know better would be my choice. It might solve one or two other problems too.

For Further reading on this topic check out Bruce Schneier excellent article http://www.schneier.com/essay-143.html

How Is Everybodies Backup Procedure?

Having just brought my second USB storage device. I have decided that it is about time that I update my own personal backup procedure. In the past I have always had great annoyance with backups on to DVD/CD media as you have to spend quite a lot of time setting it up each time and than checking it. Ultimately more time than the backup is really worth.

Project justification:

Ok we know that the question is not will you have a hardware failure but when will you have a hardware failure. If destiny has anything to do it. It will be right when you not made a backup and you need an email address to get in touch with somebody.

What ever it is a backup plan is modern business necessity and probably home computing too.

Hardware needed:

2 portable storage devices or other media. (dvd/server)

Software:

Any software that can provide an incremental backup recognise different medias, and be scheduled. I have chosen Backup4all but there are lots of others just do a search for: incremental backup software.

Files:

It is important in backing up files to insure that you are backing up the right files. One backup strategy is just to make a backup of everything on your computer including the OS. The problem with that in my view is that operating system over time slowly starts to get corrupt. Hence why we do so many clean fresh installs to insure optimum performance of the operating system. I used to make a backup off Windows XP just after I had installed it. This has served me well of over the years enabling me to restore my laptop at a moments notice and be up and running literally in 40 mins. With the advent of Vista one big change has happen in relation to backups: it got big. A basic install now takes up 6 +GB. So I have opted just to backup the first clean install and afterwards the files that I use. Microsoft provides the tools to transfer all the important bits of data and settings from one pc to another if you are looking at installing on several different machines, like a laptop for example.

Frequency:

How often should you back up? This is a tricky one, ultimately every time a file is created or changed. I am sure in reality this does not happen. You can set up a backup so that it will only backup recent file changes. Effectively creating a small job that only does what is necessary. For my home PC I have choose to do a backup once a week. As I am only editing documents and than emailing them I feel this is a risk I am comfortable with. I think that really is the answer to the question. What are you comfortable having backed up after analysing your own situation.

An important point to remember here is that if your hard disk fails in operation is very likely that the data is still on the disk. So if you take the disk to a professional data recovery service. They will be able to recovery data for a price depending on the amount of data. The down side to this is that it will take time. If it contains mission critical data you may well have a problem.

Method:

I have chosen to use two usb storage devices for my backups I will use each one alternate weeks with one device going off site in case of fire. My main reason for using storage devices is that data management is much easier. In the past I have used CD/DVD but the amount time spent cataloguing and organising the date has proven not to be time effective. Fundamentally with usb storage devices the data is accessible up to date and online at time that you require it.

Result

If I was to have a major hardware failure and a hurricane destroyed my house the most date I would lose would be the last 2 weeks of work. Now having reached this point a couple of parting thoughts. Folder share allows you to mirror files on two machines over a network and it is free. If one is concerned about the integrity ands security of their data a good online service such as Idrive will provide a great service in data backup all for a couple of dollars a month and much less of a hastle.

I hope this give you a few ideas for your own backup plan.

If want to see how much your money is worth in another currency instead of searching the internet for a website all you need to do is literally type in what you are looking for as the example below shows. This is a simple but great advancement in web technology.

Type in the Google search box this: 200 dollars in pounds:

Demo link here

Will give you this result:

200 U.S. dollars = 100.877635 British pounds

Rates provided for information only - see disclaimer. More about currency conversion.

I have checked the rates and they are correct which is great for the competition I ran here: http://workconnexions.com/node/659

The same will also work for mpg3 files. The search parameters you need are:

“song title here” intitle:index.of mp3 -html -htm -php -asp -txt –pls

You will need to change the song title to the one you are searching.

What does it mean having a presence on the internet, can you buy a office and move your staff in. Well the answer to the question is yes. For internetholics it has been well known that you can buy virtual love to real estate on line. This can take several forms, Second life for example allows you to interact with an array of potential customers, build a virtual office, hire staff. You might well be thinking now this is great, this is just what I need, low overheads, no sloppy staff, work from wherever I choose. But there is a problem. While there are virtual millionaires on second life. Their virtual business supports a real life business and vice-a-versa.

So what does this mean, well there will be any number of businesses out there who have dipped there toe in the internet water to see what is on offer. If you really want to make that website pay for itself along with your internet connection and computers there are a number of things you will have to do.

First it is about getting as many links as possible pointing to your website. This is done by interacting and commenting in communities. Web 2.0 now offers users the chance to do traditional business but with new technology. The problem with this is that is not very well understood in general by people over 35. So the boss of your local taxi company, accountant etc does not really know what a blog is, or a virtual business etc. Now if they do not know, how can anyone expect it to be taken seriously in the company ranks. Of course you will have your office junior who will have a virtual girlfriend, do virtual sports, already spend a large percentage of his money on the internet and related hardware etc. While the rest of the your staff will struggle with an email attachment that the virus scanner has disallowed because it was told that it is possible for a photo to have a virus in it. Yes it is possible but in the whole of my 12 year IT career I have never come across it. Given that almost 50+ percent of photos on the internet are JPEGS. It is a threat but a low threat and one that we can live with. One cannot really compare it to the risk of not getting your work done for the client and the time it would involve to check every photo.

So a balanced sensible approached is needed for work and business security so it can work at an optimum. No longer can staff say “Oh I do not understand” when a web page fails to load and the message on the screen reads your internet connection is on available at this time due to maintenance work. Involving your company on the internet is fundamentally about involving your employees. We do seminars about web 2.0 but it has to come from the top down. I suggest that smaller companies get the youngest employees to tell them what they know about the internet. This will serve two purposes one you see just what the internet can do, and two you will have a starting point to building an online presence for your company.