171 karma · joined April 23, 2007
People on FB come to socialize not to buy. You have to get under the skin to get that conversion, and as so many of the app providers will tell you, it takes a lot of repeat impressions to get a conversion.
For them.
For those of us who prefer not to DRM our machines to death, XP is going to be around for some time to come. Most folks like us stopped using explorer long ago.
This decision helps open source browsers gain greater market share so I welcome it.
Anything Microsoft does that helps open source alternatives is win in my book.
Thanks MS!!!!
Fate, especially a tragic or ruinous one.
doom (dm) n.
1. Inevitable destruction or ruin. 2. Fate, especially a tragic or ruinous one. 3. Judgment Day
hmmm.....
presumptuous at best...
FOR DRM.
I avoid the home page as much as possible at Yahoo, its a complete disaster.
The key value can be found in the @mention box on the right hand side of the interface. If people are making mentions with your name, that appears in your @mention box. Every time that happens that is an invitation for you to "ask a question".
Ask enough questions and in short order you will establish a relationship with a prospect. Ask the right questions and you will convert that prospect to customer status.
If you do this right, and your honest with the account, i.e. your profile, your twit background, and your tweets openly publicize your business status, you will be rewarded with 5-10 new leads a day who are actively interested in what you offer.
That begins by carefully selecting who you follow. Don't follow more people in a day than you can actively interact with in a single day.
Don't ask questions that are leading. Always ask questions that require a reply.
Don't press anyone who isn't engaged in the answers.
Always acknowledge the answers.
Take your time. Be patient. Offer value when asked.
I tell clients to imagine you have entered a coffee shop and every table is taken. Find an empty seat near someone who has a profile you think would make for an interesting conversation.
Be polite. Ask for permission to sit down. Do not talk about yourself. Ask questions. Learn what you can about your table mate. At some point that person is going to become actively interested in who you are. They will visit your profile, look at your tweets, click through to your site. And if you are providing value at any of the touch points they see, your going to convert many to follower status, and some to customer status.
And the best thing about this approach is that you never spammed anyone. The entire cycle began with them talking to you.
The only part of this method i left out is the step where you get them to mention back to you. I will leave that to your imagination. And if your a bright cookie, you will find a quick answer to that.
For those of you who find this methodology tedious, and too hard to sustain, GOOD. That's better for me. The barrier to entry is hard work. Every day.
And a bit of imagination.
If your tired of paying for $1.00 click thrus, the silly keyword scoring BS, rampant competitor click fraud, and not knowing anything about your traffic unless it converts, switch tactics.
I don't give a hoot about how Linked In makes its buck. A free account allows you to join 50 groups. If you setup a profile aimed at your target demo, and then join the right groups, you can post a weekly blog article notice that gets seen by 250k+ real human beings that actually converse about the topics you write about.
If you are a smart cookie you can leverage low cost labor for about $25 a week to write the article, post the notice across 50 groups, and average about 5000 real nice visitors a week. No click fraud, engaged readers, 1-2% conversions for your paying adv's. What would the same 20,000 clicks cost you on Google?
That's what Linked In is good for...
And Twitter too...
Facebook, not so much...
Facebook is useless for this, as a personal account maxes at 5k. Useless.
That's not slavery. As far as classifying quality of work effort by country, try it yourself and in a short time you will learn that different cultures deliver different types of workers, and thinking, and creativity. I know that sounds strange, but it is true.
And here is the funny part of the entire deal. If you suddenly found yourself transported to Russia, Romania, India, the Philippines, or China, good luck getting work as Americans are mostly viewed as fat, lazy, complaining do nothings, who barely understand the concept of a hard days work for a fair wage.
Ask every foreign employee that works for me and not one of them would agree with your comment. They are grateful to have the work, to work at home, to raise their families well, and to do so by using their brains.
I don't feel the least bit bad for outsourcing either. Americans are the hardest employees to manage, and rarely deserve their high cost. There is a huge downside to working with the ME generation. Most think that a job is an entitlement. Ugh...
This story is a reflection of those of us without timing or luck, who grind it out day in day out. It is a nice counter balance to the inspirational, but largely unobtainable heights discussed in the stories normally posted here.
Maybe in the beginning you can take the high road, and find "more to life" than this guy does. But for those of us who left the high road long ago, and are raising families, and paying mortgages, and grinding out a living online, this guys approach is sage advice.
The truth gets up voted.
Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month.
And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from.
And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud.
I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues.
If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines.
As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk.
I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.
For our blog review sites they are the source of the reviews we create. For our product news sites they do product write ups. For our e-book sites they write the e-books. For clients who need whitepapers, they write them.
We do not post on any sites other than our own or on client SMO accounts. We never post anonymously, we never post on a site that is not registered to a paying client.
We do not spam. Spam is for folks who can't originate good content. Over half our content gets re-tweeted, or link backs, so we are doing this the right way.
There is a lot more but the basic principle is that if we are being paid by a client to post on their properties, its legitimate. If they don't own the property, we don't work with them.
This is not the kind of stuff you spend one second banning since none of it is posted to your sites. It is strictly created by and for and posted on the sites owned by the clients.
When you step out of the box and think, you can find plenty of legitimate ways to leverage low cost content providers, for profit.
You can stop wincing now...
perhaps you refer to the "mac people" as there is at least one of us out here who "likes" the asus netbook he typed this with and uses every day, and LOVES.
In a nutshell human beings have depleted helium reserves on planet earth to the point that within 20 years we run out. Now you say, big deal, no more party balloons. But little do you realize that the manufacturing processes for just about everything super technical requires helium. It's a big enough deal that both Russia and China are developing standalone robotic systems to harvest helium-3 from moon rocks where its found in great abundance due to the suns constant bombardment of the surface rocks which creates the substance. Helium-3 is also a core ingredient in fusion reactor processes and as such is required in great quantities to sustain the fusion reactor operations.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html
So there is a strategic value which while not important at this moment, will likely be a driving force in space economics in 20 years...
If this mutation is successful, changes in the population will eventually bear out a larger group of mutations, than earlier populations. I definitely believe its a genetic issue and one that will be identified fully in time, as our understanding of the brain evolves.
At some point we may release the baggage of our childhood and move out into the universe that beckons. But, as long as there are more people hell bent on believing the rapture is just around the corner, the less likely I believe our species can survive.
We have technology that can eliminate us, stories in the Bible, Quran, and Torah that predict our demise, and a world full of believers set on seeing it through.
Obviously, this does not add up to a Star Trek ending. Only science can save us. Hopefully, one day they will find this root of all evil and remove it from the population.
Maybe, just maybe, we will last that long.
I doubt it.
Now for the real story.
51-22 = 29 years of programming for the same company. Which means John started programming about the time the IBM XT came out. So I doubt his MASM 4.1 and C skills would have lasted him the 29 years he worked at BIG JOB. In fact, given the pace of change, its pretty much a go he didn't last 29 years at any single BIG JOB.
Worse yet, when John started he likely worked on a Mainframe or Micro using VMS or a commercial *nix variant and had COBOL skills. Since the WWW was still a text based protocol running on a military network John wasn't likely to have any Internet skills at this point.
John likely ran a Wildcat BBS, or E systems communication system using dialup. John did this until about 1992 when the Net finally took. Along the way John continued with COBOL and his Mainframe buddies shifted over to the net. After Y2K fewer and fewer of his buddies stayed in COBOL and the market for his skills went through the roof.
Today John still hacks out COBOL for legacy systems and makes about triple what he did in 1989 when he started because the idiot children of this age think the only way you can carve out a living is with your RUBY slippers, drinking a cup of JAVA, while you fight it out with INDIA for your job.
But John doesn't have that problem, because believe it or not he knows what an AS400 is, and YOU DO NOT.
John is socking away enough bank by being available for legacy gigs because the market passed him by. Thank god for that...
And yes I know John. More than a couple of us old farts do...
Now lets stroll down that hill and have a poke with all them cows....
2 centavos..