Are You Boring Your Customers

The business world is changing and your company must catch up. Consumers are driving the quest for information and personality. Customers are demanding to trade their hard earned cash for prompt, reliable, trust worthy and friendly services. Clients yearn for the days when a company took care of them.

Is your company doing all it can to establish a regular, consistent, focused, friendly relationship with each and every customer? Are you delivering powerful content and information to your clients? Are you providing answers to their concerns and questions before they have to ask? Are you doing all of this through old-fashioned, out-dated and ineffective marketing techniques?

Forget about the postcards that remind your customers to get their oil changed or the weekly sales circular. That is not innovation. In today’s business world those techniques are considered par. Your company should be doing something similar already.

However, your company needs an innovative, never-ending marketing campaign that leverages your database to its fullest potential. Your company needs to become the leader in your field; you must set yourself apart from all the others. You must put your company in front of your customer’s eyes every single chance you get. Your company must thrive on customer service and attention.

Your client sees your competitors every single day. They get the same sales letter from 15 different stores. They hear the same jingles and the same promises. In fact, your clients are getting tired of it. Your marketing campaign could be back firing on you! Think about it. You could be losing money because you current marketing campaign is stale and boring. It’s nothing special or spectacular. Are you spending tons of money just to be average?

Your company needs a fresh customer service campaign that delivers new and repeat business. It needs to be a lead generating machine and it needs to educate your current customers about your company and your services. You do not need to pay thousands of dollars to do this. You do not need to hire the world’s foremost marketing firms and you certainly do not need to spend all of your time creating new ideas.

It’s time businesses realize what their customers really want. They want honest answers from you. They want you to solve their problem. They want you to be the expert in your field. They want to trust you. They want to know that you have their best interest in mind and will do whatever it takes to make them happy.

The most successful businesses are taking advantage of the Internet revolution. They are building content focused websites for their current company, or they are starting brand new companies to fill a current market void.

You can create a targeted, lead generating, consumer focused website that delivers the goods for less than the cost of one yellow pages ad. These days you do not even have to learn HTML or some other seemingly foreign language. The web is exploding with do-it-yourself websites. The trick is finding one the produces results for your company.

The Right Marketing Materials For Your Auto Repair Services

How you present your auto repair shop is how people will think of it. Getting customers in the door means presenting a positive, professional image. You still need to provide exceptional service when servicing cars the technical side is extremely important but first and foremost you need customers and those customers need to be quality customers, who will come back for repeat business.

Online Marketing
Websites are very beneficial for providing information to your auto repair customers and potential customers. Many auto repair shop owners also assume that having a website will be the solution to all their marketing problems. After all, its the digital age and online marketing is a popular way to reach customers these days. However, online marketing should be executed with the same care as any other marketing strategy.

The Email Campaign
The email campaign is a great example of an online strategy that requires thought before executing. Similar to a direct mail campaign, sending out emails to any and everyone can be a big waste of your timem, says Ron Ipach, owner of CinRon Marketing Group. Only about 20% of promotional emails are opened. Of that 20% that are opening the email, maybe 10% are reading the contents. So you likely put in a good deal of time in composing and designing your email possibly you even paid a graphic designer to make an HTML version of your email and for all that work, maybe 10 people read it.

The subject line of your email is an essential aspect of whether people actually open your email or not. If you form your subject line to look like spam then most people will likely delete it without even opening it. You may even be offering something of value in your email, like a free oil change or 10% or 20% off a particular service, but if you do not make that clear in the subject line, chances are no one will even know.

First Impression
First impressions are everything. And when the first impression that a customer has of your auto repair shop is your marketing materials, it needs to portray the image of professionalism. If your mail snail or email looks like junk mail, then the only customers that you will attract into your auto repair shop are bottom feeders. Cater to the customers that will give you repeat business by creating pieces that appear to be of value.

If it looks like junk mail then it is going to get thrown away, says Ipach. Think about the details when sending out marketing and advertising pieces; what does your envelope look like? What image are you portraying with it?

Marketing is not simply the act of sending out information and ‘attempting’ to reach hundreds of potential clients; you need to actually make an impression and ensure that those potential clients eventually become your regular clients. You need to stop attracting those bottom feeders and start building a clientele that will see you as a trusted auto repair shop with talented technicians, which will keep them coming back for more.

Html5 – Not Designed For Business Applications

HTML5 – Not Designed for Business Applications

HTML5 is the next version of HTML to come along since version 4.0 in 1997.

HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language and HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of web pages. The Internet would not exist as we know it today without HTML.

But HTML is not a programming language at all. This concept is confusing to some people. Web pages rely on a scripting language such as JavaScript in order to respond to user input. Think of it as HTML being a car and JavaScript being the engine.

JavaScript was introduced in 1995 by Netscape and coincidentally, that’s when the web started to really “take off”. This is an important fact to consider before we dig deeper into HTML5.

The open source nature of HTML and JavaScript has contributed to the growth of the Internet as a whole. Source code and design ideas are often borrowed from around the web and even from competitor’s web sites. This is facilitated by the fact that HTML and JavaScript are impossible to hide or protect.

HTML5 is no different!

There has been a lot of talk about HTML5 over the past couple of years and developers think that HTML5 is “cool” and “fun” to work with. But the logic ends there.

As usual with most new technologies, there has been confusion and misinformation over when HTML5 should be used and for what purpose. We aim to enlighten you about what HTML5 can and can’t do in this article.

New Features Same Old Concept

HTML5 includes new features such as the “Canvas” element, along with audio, video and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content, some of which replace the “object” tags of HTML4. There have also been some modifications and standardization of tags such as (a, cite, menu) but the basic concept of HTML remains the same in HTML5.

Who’s Promoting HTML5?

HTML5 was originally proposed by Opera Software (makers of the Opera web browser) and designed by the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C.

An important point is that the W3C has been criticized as being dominated by larger organizations and thus writing standards that represent their interests.

The large organizations (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Google and Facebook) have promoted HTML5 as the most up to date technology for web development. In fact the late Steve Jobs termed HTML5 as the win-win solution for consuming any kind of web content on all types of web platforms. But it is important to note that Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook each have an incentive for promoting HTML5; each own and operate very profitable “app” stores such as the Windows Marketplace, Google App Store, iTunes App Store, Facebook Canvas Apps, etc. Protection of intellectual property and trade secrets is of little or no concern to those companies and in fact it is almost a conflict of interest.

Fact #1: HTML5 is based on JavaScript, which is impossible to protect. Yes, that’s a fact!

As we discussed a moment ago, JavaScript is the core “language” of HTML5, whose source code is impossible to protect. The most evident reason is that anyone can view HTML5 and JavaScript source by just a simple click. JavaScript was never intended to be anything more than an engine for client-server communication and re-useable web content, including menus, buttons, tabs and the like.

Developers may argue that they can mangle JavaScript source code by obfuscation and pseudo-encryption (such as “minification”, where the code is compressed and “minified”). But this is a dangerously false sense of security. Any skilled developer can reverse engineer a “minified” or “obfuscated” JavaScript application. By design, JavaScript cannot be encrypted and it cannot be hidden. JavaScript files must be downloaded in order to run in a web browser.

To make matters worse, JavaScript also cannot be locked down to a specific web domain.

The code is accessible to be hacked by any competitor. No matter how many steps are taken to hide the JavaScript, the web browser eventually downloads the JavaScript file to run it within the client’s web browser.

For comparison, hacking a Flash or Silverlight application just by viewing the source is not very easy but anyone with a little knowledge of HTML5 can do it in minutes.

The hacks of famous HTML5 games like AngryBirds, Texas Holdem and many others are excellent examples of the insecure techniques employed by HTML5 developers. All security measures are useless once the code has been obtained and reverse engineered. No matter what any HTML5 or JavaScript developer may claim, these facts are true and irrefutable!

Fact #2: The concept of HTML5 Canvas is nothing new.

As we discussed already, HTML5 is based on the same concepts of HTML4. The most useful and talked about feature of HTML5 is the new “Canvas” object. Canvas makes it easy for JavaScript developers to “paint” within a web browser, simplifying the design of applications that utilize graphics. But you may be surprised to know that this functionality has been available in a simulated manner with very little attention since the release of HTML4.

Fact #3: There is a widespread misconception about HTML5

HTML5 has been labeled as a “cross platform programming language” which is a serious misconception. It is true that HTML5 is capable of running on all types of platforms such as Windows, Linux, Android and other mobile operating systems but let’s not forget that HTML5 is nothing more than web page markup, which is controlled by JavaScript. Classifying HTML5 and JavaScript as a true programming language would be incorrect. It is a browser integrated language that cannot utilize all the features of the underlying operating system.

When Should You Use HTML5?

The answer is quite simple. Use HTML5 when you do not care about your source code, intellectual property, or trade secrets. If you do not care that a competitor may steal your source code after it has been uploaded to your web site then use HTML5. As you can see, HTML5 is perfect for buttons, menus and website specific content, for which it was designed.

The Bottom Line – Better Options Available

The bottom line is that HTML5 and JavaScript are great for a lot of things, but you can’t effectively protect anything that you develop with them. This clearly doesn’t add up if you are using these technologies for developing business applications, which they were not designed for.

If you are developing a web application then consider using Flash or Silverlight, both of which run in all popular web browsers for desktop operating system, including Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you are developing a mobile application, there are far better options for iPhone, iPad and Android development that afford better protection of trade secrets, better security, performance and usability for the end user and also allow you to take advantage of the native features of the underlying operating systems. For iOS (iPad and iPhone), use the Object C programming language. For Android, use the Java programming language.

For Windows development, consider C++, C#, Delphi or other proven languages.

Although slightly more difficult to develop with, Objective C, C++, C#, Java and other low level languages are always the best option no matter if you are developing desktop, web, or mobile applications.

Permission to Redistribute

Copyright (c) 2012 by Modulus Financial Engineering, Inc. http://www.modulusfe.com All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to redistribute the article providing this copyright notice remains in place.

About the Author

Richard Gardner is Founder/CEO of Modulus Financial Engineering, Inc. In addition to his leadership role of the firms team members, Richard is an influential member of the financial technology industry at large, a globally-respected professional trader and software engineer, a guest speaker at industry conferences and among the inventors on over 70 technology patents.

Marketing Techniques Development And

Social media advertising and marketing is a subset of Digital Marketing and among the leading social networks activity for businesses is that of making use of facebook for advertising and marketing. Among things that business are advised to do is to include a connected to their company Facebook web page or a ‘like’ button with a Facebook feed on the company’s blog or web site. You can effortlessly discover HTML codes for these in the environments of your Facebook profile. This will enable your visitors to ‘such as’ your web page and sign up for your posts without needing to look you up on Facebook.

One more point thar a business need to do is to have an expose tab on its Facebook web page: only pals or followers will be able to see it. Urge individuals to ‘like’ the business’s r page so they could have accessibility to this unique material. You could for circumstances disclose a distinct voucher code to the Facebook customers which have ‘suched as’ your page.

Prior to starting a social networking sites advertising and marketing campaign you should take into consideration acquiring quick guides or working with a digital advertising and marketing strategy consultant such as Stephen C Campbell to lead your company in the best direction. A guide includes information about the leading social networking sites sites. It will certainly provide you all that you require to know from the basics of establishing a page to strategies to boosting website traffic.

Do not neglect to comment on content as well. Social networking is not simply about uploading your updates. You must most likely not comment on anything that looks also individual, considering that you wish to keep your partnership with your close friends as professional as possible. If you view an article connected to your sector, provide your input.

While you may discover some problems that just weren’t covered in this article, you now have a general idea of successful social media sites marketing. Since social networks continuously modifications and evolves, you have to have the ability to adapt to them. Usage every tool you could to obtain and keep a huge audience.

How to generate cash on the world-wide-web with internet marketing and advertising

This really is query I hear every one of the time. Since this forum is an incredible area to speak about it I’ve determined to write down fast entry with some guidelines to get you started out doing income within the Internet. Enable’s beak the entire approach into few straightforward to adhere to actions…

Phase 1: Do not just leap into every possible web-based application it is possible to find!

I don’t know why but individuals preserve thinking which the extra software programs to be a part of the more cash they’ll make. That is clearly not genuine. Decide on 1 application and concentrate your strength and work on couple of merchandise at a time.

This is way you are going to forestall number one particular trouble why most people by no means earn money on the net – they basically wind up overcome! Do not do exactly the same mistake. But this begs dilemma – how do you choose appropriate goods with cash generating prospective. Solution is uncomplicated…

Step two: Do Marketplace And Keyword Study

The easiest way to produce dollars on the World-Wide-Web is usually to sell what persons are by now purchasing. This manner you simply go wherever the money is. This stuff has been figured out currently. It won’t need to have any genius. Considering that you may have to by some means and somewhere promote your associate products so as to create income, you can have to do some simple key phrase study employing free methods (you’ll find a great number of totally free resources available that it is really not humorous anymore).

Listed here are some suggestions for effective key phrase investigation:

choose search phrases with at the least 10,000 month to month queries

make an effort to choose extended tail keywords to avaid heavy level of competition

look for keywords with competitiveness of close to 50,000 to 100,000 competing pages

Phase 3: When you recognize what markets you want to enter then you are able to go and look for affiliate items.

Choose items that pay out out at least $30 so it will probably be worth your time and effort. This really is technique of generating income to the World-Wide-Web. You can find numerous of affiliate networks you can signal-up for. A single of your very best regarded is clickbank.

Move 4: Based in your keyword exploration now you must construct some sort of internet site or webpage in which you may advertise affiliate items you’ve got chosen in factor 3. You don’t will need any HTML information simply because it is possible to use totally free expert services like blogger to construct up your website in no time.

You also need to obtain domain identify and internet hosting package. Make sure to include your principal search phrases within your domain title for look for engine optimisation purposes.

Move 5: So as to make money on the net with affiliate merchandise you would like traffic

You may use totally free approaches including:

Search Engine Marketing

Blogging

Posting marketing

Discussion board advertising

Interpersonal bookmarking

Societal networking

Press frees

Hub pages

Or you’ll be able to use Paid out-For methods for example Google AdWords or some other method. The strategy should be to create targeted traffic to your web site or web site so you can begin making dollars on the world wide web.

Factor half a dozen: Assemble mailing lists

Funds is inside the number! Utilization of-in pages to convert internet site site visitors into subscribers and after on – purchasers. Bear in mind! It is really much less costly to retain present client than it can be to acquire new one.

That is in nutshell how to make cash for the Internet with affiliate marketing marketing. I hope you’ve observed it helpful! Really don’t neglect to share your thoughts!

Admarketpros Targeted traffic Website – 2am Traffic Posting System

You can Earn Money by Blogging!/p>

In truth, this is. In the event the first outburst of blogging and site-building over the web was launched for hobbyists, now, get ready to enjoy carrying it out, while making thousands of dollars.

Yes, truly and surely, you can make money blogging. Logically, probably the most you may make offers some hundred dollars a month that can’t be available on trees or scoffed at. These days, the Web, a social networking of bloggers, have provided more alternatives and ways where you’ll be able to increase your earning potential with blogs.

Do you need to earn money blogging? Then, choose an ideal blog that may focus on your needs for a blog, sign up, create a blog and publish it straight away! Blogging sites let you build blogs in accordance with your tastes. Others have HTML and link options. Others have personalized templates where you can improve your blog page’s color and design.

Among signing up and making a blog, though, you must realise what at the mercy of blog about. Your subject matter is an important consideration, so invest some time conceptualizing before getting into the fray. In case you got to know, this issue could be the determining factor the amount of money you can generate using the blog you will create.

Look for content or topics that pay more from per click and the like. Check out Ppc and AdSense to understand the amount each clicks a topic costs. Google AdSense then permits you to place ads on the blog. Once a user transpires with open your blog post and click on the advertisement, you will earn money onto it. Just that!

There is also the Blog Advertising services in which enables you to gain treatments for the ads appearing in your blog. This particular service isn’t using a pay-per-click system, meaning it will permit you to make money blogging regardless of the variety of clicks the ads.

It is because BlogAds pay companies for your space of the ads for a certain period. Their sign up options are free and after joining, you may then know what your advertising prices you may charge.

As soon as your offering is announced to businesses, consequently, they will contact you on an ad’ space in your blog. Google, meanwhile, will set any ad which includes keywords related to your blog post. Any which way, you’re bound to earn.

Discover how to generate a supplementary $500 30 days working Half hour per day 5 days every week using a website blogging system.Have the free blueprint here! Learn to Share cool content with friends and family and get paid.

How To Write Better Php Code These 7 Ways

You don’t need to remember functions, classes and specific solutions to be a good programmer. They are online, accessible at any time. And being a PHP developer you are unlikely to do much important work without being connected to the internet. Then what makes a good programmer? For me a good PHP programmer means someone who is efficient – who can solve problems and build quality web based software quickly and in a way that allows easier maintenance and extending of the program.

So being a good PHP programmer means mostly to write a good code with less effort and time spent. And here is what does that mean – several main things:

– Code that is short. I don’t mean putting everything on one line like some Perl coders do, but writing less waste, reusing code and keeping it modular
– Code that is easy to maintain and extend – this again means modular, but also a well commented PHP code.
– Code that doesn’t overload the server – you shouldn’t get obsessed by this but it’s important to keep the server overload low

How to write such code? There isn’t a specific recipe – every developer has its own style regardless the fact that many use frameworks or follow specific guidelines. So I’m not going to offer you a recipe. Instead of that here are seven of the best practices I follow to write better PHP (and not only PHP) code. If you use them too, you can drastically improve your efficiency as a developer.

1. Use alternative PHP syntax in templates:
I really hope you use templates, to begin with. If you are messing the HTML output directly into your scripts, you need to work on this first. If you already follow the concept to separate your design from the program logic, you are either using some template engine (usually a dead end reducing productivity) or placing a bit of PHP code inside the templates (loops, if/else statements etc). You can add some more cleanness to your views by using the alternative PHP syntax instead of the standard one with “{” and “}”. Using foreach: / endforeach;, if: endif; for: endfor, etc. keeps the PHP code on less lines in the view, helps knowing when a loop is opened and closed and generally looks better.

You can learn more about the alternative PHP syntax on the official PHP site – just search for “Alternative syntax for control structures”.

2. Everything capsulated:
You know about the DRY, don’t you? Don’t Repeat Yourself. Don’t copy-paste code. Always use functions and classes that will encapsulate often executed tasks. I know this is ABC of programming, but are you really really doing it? If one SQL query or code block is repeating itself 3 or more times in the application, then it should be a method or function. If it is repeating itself with slight variations, it should be a method or function as well (one that takes arguments). Here is what encapsulation gives you:

– less code, less writing
– ability to make changes across the entire app with a single code change
– clean and understandable code

These three things really make a better code. Let’s get a very simple example: which you think is better – formatting the date in the SQL query or in the PHP code? Both are fine if you encapsulate the format. If you use the standard PHP date() function everywhere or the SQL date formatting function, passing the format that the client requires, to each call, what will happen if the client wants a change? You’ll have to change it everywhere. To avoid that, build your own function to format the date or just put the formatting string (the “Y/m/d H:i A” thing for example) in a constant, so you can change it any time.

3. Use a DB object:
There are many ways to handle this, including ODBC, PDO and others. Whatever you do, don’t put mysql_query() or mssql_query() (or whatever) directly in your code. It’s not that you are going to change the DB engine ten times in the project – in fact in eight years in web development I had to change the DB engine of an existing project just a couple of times. It’s again about keeping the code short, readable and better. For example I have a DB object with methods that return a single value, single array or multiple array from a DB query. This way instead of writing:

$sql=”SELECT * FROM some_table”;
$result=mysql_query($sql);

and then using $result in some construction like while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)), I just write:

$sql=”SELECT * FROM some_table”;
$some_things=$DB->aq($sql);

And I have the result in $some_things. (Note: don’t use this when retrieving thousands of records at once, it will exhaust the server memory).

4. Use CRUD Functions:
Just in case you don’t know, CRUD comes from CReate, Update, Delete. Create functions or object methods which will do this work for you or use the well known ActiveRecord. Do this instead of writing long SQL queries with tens of fields listed. This is going to save you a lot of time. It’s going to work automatically when you add or remove a field in the HTML form. Isn’t that great?

5. Debugging is your best friend:
Ok this point isn’t directly related to writing a better code – it’s more related to being a better programmer however. If something doesn’t work, you are not likely to fix it just by thinking hard or by looking at hundreds of lines of code. It’s not going to happen by swearing either. It’s going to happen by debugging.

Debugging is the action of going back following the logic of your program and finding the place where it works wrong or doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if you use a debugger or just print_r() and echo() in various places of your code. The important thing is to trace backwards. Start from the current place – is there something wrong in it? If yes, go back few lines before the output/result happens. Is it still wrong? If yes, keep going few lines back. If no, then you know where exactly is the wrong piece of code – after this current line and before the line when your latest “is it wrong?” test returned true. I may sound bold, but I’ll say that this is the most important skill in programming (and not only) ever: to be able to go back and trace the route of the problem. If you learn to do this, you will be able to solve any solvable problem.

6. Mind the names:
A code that uses meaningful variable names is so much better – at any time you read it you know what is happening – is there a product currently modified, is it an array of users, is it the ID of the logged in, or is it anything else. I am not talking about Hungarian notation – just use variable names which correspond to the subject they represent and show whether it’s in singular or plural form. Don’t use variable names like $rows, $row, $varArr etc. Instead of that use $products when you are working with products, use $user when you are working with a single user, use $is_logged or $isLogged when you need a boolean variable showing whether the user is logged in the system. Use names that matter and be consistent in that. You’ll thank yourself later for writing such code. Other developers will thank you too.

7. Reduce DB queries:
It’s a common sense, but how many developers really do it? How many of them spend hours improving some unimportant thing like moving a sizeof() out of a loop and at the same time send a DB query in the very same loop? DB queries are the most server power consuming task in many web applications. Here are several ways to reduce the number of queries in your code:

– Use joins and left joins.
– Use inner selects when joins and left joins won’t do the job.
– Use views and temporary tables.
– Sometimes you’ll need to check something for a number of records and the previous three solutions won’t work. Instead of running a query each time, isn’t it possible to run one query for collection A, one for collection B and then use a foreach loop in PHP to check the condition? Very often it is. Be creative.

Reducing the number of queries is vital for web applications that are going to be used by many users at the same time. Sometimes you may need to sacrifice code shortness for that. This will not make your code worse – you should give the things their correct priority.

Are you following any of these guidelines in your code now?