How I Got Through College
Posted on 03. Dec, 2009 by search_junkie.
Getting through college was exceptionally difficult for me. My family had no money and I was not super motivated to do well in school after I finished high school. After working many different jobs, scraping by to make the bills and put a roof over my head, I finally wised up and figured out that if I ever wanted to go anywhere with my life that I had to get an education.
At this point I started applying for student loans, as well as financial aid. I was fortunate enough to get the maximum award for both. But that was still not enough. I was not able to work full time AND attend school full time. So I decided to apply for private student loans to help me with bills like gas, car insurance, and rent. Thankfully I was able to get enough loans to pay my bills so that I could focus my attention on school. Once I did this my grades excelled and I eventually won a bunch of scholarships!
If you are having financial trouble while working towards your degree then student loans are the way to go. And remember that there are not just federal and state loans, but there are also a number of good private student loans with great rates available for you.
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Track Your Marketing Initiatives Using Call Tracking
Posted on 27. Oct, 2009 by search_junkie.
It is such a shame these days that businesses, especially local businesses, are spending money on marketing blindly. They are not getting the data necessary to back up their decisions. Tracking you marketing initiatives has never been easier than it is today.Simply using a call tracking number is one of the best ways to measure the success of certain marketing initiatives.
I found this outstanding Call Tracking Video to help illustrate the point:
Get the point?
Call Fire offers some other great calling related services such as Voice Broadcast which is basically an email/newsletter marketing campaign but done over the phone. You record your message and enter your list of numbers to blast it out to and Call Fire does the rest! Pretty awesome, I never knew that this was something that people could do. They also offer Virtual Call Centers which I am not too familiar with but I am sure if you were in the business you would understand.
I love their site because it has great visuals that explain things. That is a fantastic example of how to use media to tell your story so take note! And don’t forget to use call tracking so that you can know what is making you the most money and allocate more resources to those things.
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Finally a Collaboration Solution for SMBs
Posted on 18. Sep, 2009 by search_junkie.
I was introduced to a fantastic SaaS solution for online collaboration today. The service is called OpenACircle. It is targeted towards small and medium sized businesses but it is so robust that I fell it would be great for large firms as well.The solution is from Dallas based VUELIVE, a video technology company.
The idea is that you can invite up to 50 people, I believe, to join your circle. And from within your circle you can video conference, chat, share files, and collaborate virtually. With today’s workforce becoming increasingly virtual, mobility and collaboration are crucial. You hold your meetings in the “Live Room” where you can stream live video of each other, desktop share, audio, IM chat, and take notes all from within a dedicated meeting environment!
A well laid out dashboard holds all of you data, meetings, messages, and connections making it easy to keep track of everything. The dashboard also has a calendar and a status feature that allows you to let your circle be aware of exactly what you are working on at the moment. I think that this would be a great feature for teams of programmers or developers that are all working on the same project at the same time. In this type of situation it is typically easy to overwrite each others work or just not be in sync, causing projects to take much longer than they should. But a service like this would eliminate those issues.
And there is a “Library” area that houses all of your documents, articles, meeting notes, images, etc. Basically all of your files can be housed here like a virtual network drive. You can create custom folders and even a personal vault that is secured. The library feature alone makes this service totally worth it!
Go ahead and give it a try, I have a feeling that you will fall in love with OpenACircle.
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Runs Like Clockwork Server Monitoring
Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by search_junkie.
If you run a server and you host domains then you have to know about server monitoring and that is one of your most powerful tools. Up time is of huge importance to site owners and most hosting companies boast about their 99.99% up times. This means that you have to work hard to maintain your servers.
But you can’t be constantly watching them, and this is where server monitoring comes in handy. Runs Like Clockwork is a company that offers a service that checks that actual html content of a website rather than just the server headers. This way you can make sure that you will never ever have the wrong site running on a client’s domain! And check out their Server monitoring price plans. After all, this type of assurance does come with at least some sort of price. It’s worth it as I guarantee you will sleep better at night. The service will even send you a message to your cell phone via SMS letting you know if a site goes down and also letting you know when it goes back up.
So do yourself and your clients a favor, get server monitoring up. Both you and your clients will sleep better at night.
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Code Validation Not a Big Deal
Posted on 09. Sep, 2009 by search_junkie.
Finally, someone has come out and said it. Code validation is a bloated waste of time and does not get you better search engine rankings. I think that Aaron Wall of SEObook.com put it best when he said,
If you are a web designer (and/or want links from pretentious web designers) then validation is a great idea…it is core to the group circle-jerk amongst cool web designers. But for everyone else, it generally doesn’t matter.
It’s basically a way for Web designers and developers to be able to justify higher costs. In fact there are studies showing that having valid code will not necessarily equate to better search engine rankings. A test by a Google engineer named Ian Hickson, in September 2006, across billions of web pages showed that 93% of the pages did not use valid code.
The idea is to get webmasters to stop wasting time and resources on validating code and instead put those resources into real traffic generating efforts like link building, paid search, or even an online contest! Makes sense to me. Anyone out there have an argument against that?
