Category Archives: Marketing

I found a great deal on a laptop.

Computers, Marketing, , , , , , , ,

The other day one of my friends who also own a computer store emailed me that he purchased a large number of great laptops for a special price. He does this about once a week so I thought little of it. Well on Friday a customer came by and was interested in getting a laptop so I told her about the one my friend had. She said it sounded good and she ordered one. MSI LaptopI left an hour later and picked up one unit from my friend.

On Saturday morning my customer came back and I opened the laptop for the first time, and I was instantly blown away. For the price that I paid this laptop was the best one that I had ever seen. First off it was made by MSI, my last laptop was also MSI, and their quality is very high, they are one of the main OEM makers of laptops, and they make laptops for many other companies. Next it was a Pearl White color, this is the favorite laptop color of most women, and this customer also really loved it. For specs it had a Dual Core T3400 Pentium CPU on the Centrino Platform, this means it is fast and saves on power. It had 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 250GB Hard Drive, Gigabit Ethernet, Modem, Wireless Lan, DVD burner, memory card reader, and a 14.1 inch wide screen all running Vista Home Premium. This is all fairly standard, but what made it stand out was the extra features, a built in 1.3MP webcam, the fingerprint reader (So you can log in to things with just your fingerprint), and support for Bluetooth and simcards. But the best part of the whole thing was the price, only $545. I looked online for another one like this and I could not find one with all these features and such a good price.

If you are interested in getting one send me an email at dragon@emeraldcomputers.com there are a few left. If they are gone there may be a different one that is also a good deal.

The biggest problem now is that my wife asked me twice today to buy her one of these.

My Rapid Development Test

Bootstrap, Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Marketing, MLM, Money,

Let me tell you a quick story about part of my week.  I think this is how true Entrepreneurs operate.

On sunday I was sent a spam email for a service that looked fairly interesting.  For $39.95 per month it was interesting but I am cheap so I did not buy.  I forwarded the link to my business partner, mostly as a joke, saying “Look how easy it is to make money online.”  When he saw the page he thought I was right, and he asked me if we could do the same thing.  I thought about it for a few seconds and figured “Why Not”   So on monday afternoon we told a few others about our idea.  They really liked it.

I then wrote a plan of how to program it, it used some PHP and some other things that were above what I could do, so I wrote a project for it and tried to get a free lancer from Asia to it.  I had many freelancers talk to me about it but it seems that none of them got it, so I started thinking about how I could do it myself.  So all tuesday morning I worked on coding, and by tuedsay afternoon it was done.  I still had a few glitches and by wednesday morning it was totally complete.   We emailed it to a few people and they were loving it.  On wednesday we had our first customer at $20 per month.  Thurday we added a second.  On friday we talked with a guy who is confident that he will help us sell 50 sites.  We gave him a free account.  Now it is friday night, one more person just signed up for $20 a month.   I figure at this rate we should have 50 new people a month or MORE.

So lets recap.   We went from idea to profits in under 72 hours.  We have zero cost other than our time, and have $60 per month coming in already with much more to come.  I will keep you updated and in a few weeks give a total of how many people we have.

Rapid Development is the key to all of this, most people I know would not just jump in, they would hesitate, and then never do the idea at all.  That is what I would normally do, but that is why I have a business partner that likes to get thigs done.

The best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas.

Business, Computers, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Investment, Marketing, MLM, Money

idea_bulbI saw this topic on a TV today, was the quote of the day.  I was thinking about it for a while and it is so true.  So many people come up with one idea and they focus on that way too long.  And for most people that idea is to work for some big company.  Once in they are in that job the company gives them a ladder that they start to climb…. work two years then get a bit more power and a bit more money, then do it all over again.  It is just enough to keep people doing it yet never enough to let them do anything else.  This works great for the people who own the company.

See I have never had a day job, I have only had businesses.  I also have make it clear to many people that I am an entrepreneur and I have surrounded myself with people that are also the same way.  This lets me get on the ground floor with some great ideas, it also give me access to many great ideas and from that I can select the best ones and work on them to make them even better.

In the last three months, I have joined an MLM company that helps people do loan modifications, I have started a new company that sells online marketing, I have been developing a concept that lets us help people create instant online stores that sell my products.  And just this week I joined another MLM that has a great marketing idea to get people more web traffic.  I also made adjustments to my main company, Emerald Computers, I have lowered prices and automated things much more. On top of this I have discovered some tools that make my life much better and more profitable, and I have connected with some people who also do the same thing for me.

So all of this means that I am much better positioned to have wealth flow towards me.  With all of these ideas at least one of them should be a home run and make my fortune this year.

The tale of the McDouble, and lessons from it.

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Investment, Marketing, Money, , , , , ,

In this age of all the hype about a down economy many people are looking to save money.  One thing that millions have done is turn to dollar menus at fast food restaurants.  I have noticed that chains with good menus are busy and still quite popular, and presumably profitable.  I have also noticed that some chains just don’t seem to be catching up, such as Arby’s, A&W and Long John Silvers.  I often drive by many of these and the parking lot is usually empty, and when I go inside the whole place is empty.  It seems that some companies are watching the trends, they share this data with all the franchise owners and make changes to their system to make it more profitable, others simply sit there and do nothing, watching their empty store.

McDonalds has always provided good value, they are good at making customers think they are getting a great deal and that is because they usually are, as long as you stick to the value menu.  The only burger left on the value menu was the Double Cheeseburger, a fairly good burger and a great value.  In December of 2008 they replaced it with the McDouble.  It is the exact same thing but with one less piece of cheese.  They say it will save them 6 cents each, and I have eaten a few of these already, they still taste just as good and now have less fat.  Of course this was done mostly to save McDonalds money, but the lesson that should be learned is that businesses have pressures that make it hard to stay profitable in this economy, while at the same time they need to offer better deals to keep the customers coming.  Some get it, and have started to change, and others are simply empty and on the road to failure.

It is hard for most small business owners to understand that by charging lower prices they can make more money per day, simply by doing more transactions.  I went to the mall this weekend and there were a few stores going out of business, they even had 50% off sales on most everything.  But even at this price they were STILL more expensive than the local Walmart, it is obvious why they went out of business.  Too many store owners in the US have really gotten away from providing value for their customers.  During my travels in Asia I have noticed that most companies have a very small markup.  I even have talked to many owners that felt that a 10-20% is fair and ethical, and more is not.

In the US for the last few decades it has been all about getting as much as you can, charging all that the market will bear.  But this mentality is not going to work any longer, too many people now are suddenly taking the time to watch their dollars.  The companies that have ran their business on this model and have grown with borrowed money to take all they can have seen their sales dry up, and their bills come due, with out being able to borrow they are going out of business.  Yesterday during my trip to the mall I visited Dillards.  Dillards had a huge sale, all watches were 50% off, Jewelry was the same, and most every section of the store was the same.  The store was packed, it took 15 minutes just to talk to someone to look at a watch, and people were buying all over the store.  Some of the employees were worried because it felt like the store was going out of business, the check out lady said she was there for many years and has never seen this before.  But for me I know that stores like this are still making money at these prices, and it is much better to sell the stuff and make something than to keep it in inventory.  An hour later I walked into Macy’s.  They have a larger store, and almost nothing was on sale, and because of that there were almost no customers in the entire store.  The employees were just sitting there.  Macy’s is a big and old company, maybe they just have deeper pockets, but more likely they just don’t get it yet.  They both are public companies and both are down over 60% in the last year, lets look a year from now to see who does better.  Dillards will be able to report higher sales.  They took a large hit in their stock price with they announced their October and November sales numbers going down 10% from 2007.

On a side note the company report from dillards says this…

During the four weeks ended November 29, 2008, sales were significantly above the average company trend in the men’s apparel and accessories and shoe categories and significantly below trend in the juniors’ and children’s apparel and home and furniture categories.

I have been told before that when the job market gets tough people tend to dress much nicer, they need nicer clothes to go to that interview or to simply look better on their current job so that they won’t be fired.  People are willing to skimp in other areas.  I just find it great when you find hard data like this to confirm everything you have been taught.

Thanks for reading, I would really like to hear from you about what you think, please leave a comment.

New eBiz started, great so far.

blogs, Business, Computers, Entrepreneurship, Marketing

Hello.    I am working on a new and exciting entry into the world of eBiz right now.  I have been putting much of my attention on this project.  So far the results have been great.  I have built a simple site that talks about what we are doing.  We then hired a few commission only employees, gave them a stack of leads and a phone and they have been out killing it.  We have been operational now for 4 days and so far the sales have totalled over $1900.  We also have almost $2000 more in pending sales where people have said yes already.

With a 30% payout to the sales force, and a 20% cost for what we provide this looks like it will be a good deal for all of us.  I also feel that we are providing something that people really need.

More on this later, I have so much that I want to blog about but my time has really been limited.  The main factor is that about 10 days ago I injured my leg and it is very hard to sit at a computer for more than an hour or so, and when I do I usually focus on the most important work that needs to be done.  I am used to being on my PC about 10 hours a day and my recent average has only been 2 hours a day.   It is ok when I sit on a sofa but I simply don’t have a laptop I like right now, sold them all.

More Successful Trades

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Marketing,

As I said before, I have experementing in trading services for services.  In the last week I have made two more successful trades.

Trade 1.

A guy had a new computer he built that was over heating, he also had 7 used computers that did not really work.  He wanted to have his computer work right and have more software, he only needed one other working computer.   What I did was trade in his 7 used computers and I gave him the nicest of all the used computers that we had.  I then rebuilt his old computer in a new case, his over heating was due to not having a case with a side fan.  I also added a used hard drive and gave him some of my files.  On top of trading in his old computers he also did a tune-up on my AC, he put 18 shingles on my roof in places where the wind blew them away and he removed 14 bags worth of grass from my back yard.  He was very happy to have the computers working and the software I gave him, I was very happy to get the jobs done.  On a even happier note two of the used computers he traded in were actuall better than the one we gave him, they just needed to have all the wires connected correctly on the inside and the OS reinstalled.

Trade 2

I pool guy called me, from Az Pool Care.  He is the owner and needed a website, he will have a basic site but with a shopping cart that can hold a few hundred items.  He is going to write all of the text and also input all the items into the cart.  I just need to do the rest, including finding a flash guy to make his logo animated.  For doing all of this, he drianed my pool, cleaned it, acid washed it, removed the sand from the filter and put in new sand, and is giving me a new cleaning machine that moves around and cleans the system, he then will put in all the start up chemicals.  He gets about a $1,500 website and I get about $1,500 in pool care.  Good trade for both of us again.  If you need pool care then call him.

Both of these trades are done on my end, on the second trade I am still waiting for content before I can fix it all.

For any business I think that trading can get you new clients and help you buy things you would not have otherwise.

14 Choices

blogs, Business, Computers, concepts, Inspiration, Internet, Marketing, Politics, real estate, The World, ,

My Choices and Why.

You have the freedom of choice, you can choose who you do business with, where you shop and what you think and believe.  Every dollar you spend is a vote for the way that company does business, are you rewarding a company for having good prices or good policies.  The choice is yours.  The important part is the WHY, why do you choose to do these things.  It is very interesting to see what people pick and why they pick it.

Please post your what who and why on these following subjects.  If you pick more than one please state them.  Some are very important and some are trivial but will shine insight on how you think.

My Choice of Political Party (If none state why)
My Choice of Operating System
My Choice of Religion
My Choice of Grocery Store
My Choice of General Merchandise Store
My Choice of Vehicle
My Choice of Housing Type
My Choice of Primary Bank
My Choice of Brokerage Account
My Choice of Gas Station
My Choice of ISP
My Choice of TV Service (Bonus Entry)
My Choice of Wireless service
My Choice of Cell phone
My Choice of Drinking Water
My Choice of Browser (Bonus Entry)

If you fill this out and make a post with your answers please post a comment on the blog where this all started, at http://capitalactive.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/14-choices/ so that everyone can read it, if you don’t have a blog of your own then put your whole answer as a comment on that blog.  Simply copy and paste the above section to start your blog, then copy the subjects again and answer them.  Also use the tag “14 Choices”.

My Choice of Political Party (If none state why)
Republican.  I generally think that government should be smaller.  I think that the republican party still stands for smaller government.  Democrats stand for more services but more taxes, which is why people who need more services often vote democrat.  In general both parties mostly are the same on most issues.

My Choice of Operating System
I choose Windows Vista.  If you asked me a year ago it was Ubuntu, and before than windows xp.  The reason I use vista is because it is more stable than XP, able to run more things than XP, and simply works better than XP.  The reason I don’t use Ubuntu any longer is because I needed to be compatible with windows to run all the software I need for my business, and the games I like.  Too many things still did not run with Ubuntu, but as an OS for stability, and fun/ease of use Ubuntu was by far the best OS.  If I was making a computer to for office us and the internet I would go with Ubuntu for sure.

My Choice of Religion
I am a Christian. I have been my whole life, I grew up in it.  Mostly I still choose to be because I think it is the right choice for my life.  I think that it is true, and that Jesus actually did die for my sins.  It also gives a good way to live and a great community to be a part of.

My Choice of Grocery Store
This is complex for me, I choose different stores for different reasons.  I like a local store called LeeLee’s for asian food.  I also shop often at Fry’s (Owned by Kroger) for the sales, but the stuff that is not on sale is often too much money.  I also buy some items from walmart but often they are not a good deal on food.  My favorite store recently is Fresh and Easy.  They have great quality and they make home made meals you can just microwave, and if you use the coupons they always give out they really are cheap.

My Choice of General Merchandise Store
Well we find ourselves at Walmart at least 4 times a week.  The main reason is that they are only 200 yards away from our house.  I like target a bit more but they are simply too far, and they have too small of a food section, there is no super target near where I live.  Walmart seems to have at least 80% of the items I am looking for and usually at a good price.  They also usually have a good amount of stuff on clearance, I have noticed that prices change a lot there and there are a lot of things that are usually too much.

My Choice of Vehicle
The Vehicle I drive is a Pontaic Aztek.  It is an odd vehicle.  It is what is called a cross over.   I originally bought it because it had huge cargo space, good gas milage and it was high profile so I could see over all the cars out there.  I also really liked how unique it was and it was very comfortable for me to drive.  It has been, by far, the best vehicle I have ever owned, but it is getting older and I should replace it soon.

My Choice of Housing Type
I live in a nice large house, in the suburb of a Major US city.  I love close enough that I can go downtown is under 15 minutes yet far enough that it is nice and yuppie.  I bought a house larger than I needed so that I could rent rooms out if I wanted, and also have room for a large office and a workshop.  I don’t really care for houses too much because there is no community, no one here talks to each and I have only talked with my neighbors a few times.

My Choice of Primary Bank
My primary bank is really a Credit Union.  They are cheap, no fees and such, and they usually have no line or a very small line.  I also banks with Wells Fargo, US Bank and B of A just to have flexibility but none of them are my main bank.

My Choice of Brokerage Account
I have tried a few out there but I have stuck with eTrade for quite a while.  They have great software that gives you a ton of information.  Some other places out there have been advertising better prices for trade, and also have built great software tools so I may try them.

My Choice of Gas Station
By far I like QT (QuickTrip) the best.  They usually have good gas prices but the reason I like them is that their gas seems to work better in my Aztek.  I get better mileage when I use their fuel vs most other brands. I also really like their drinks, they have a ton of unique and very good drinks, including a Horchata shake, and a Hot Milk drink, both only $1.09 for a very large cup.

My Choice of ISP
Again the choice is clear, I choose Cox, they have the best service, best uptime and best prices.  Internet over Cable is always much better than DSL.

My Choice of TV Service
For this I also use Cox, they have a fairly good Digital Converter with a nice list of HD channels.  I have been looking into Dish Network recently, they have even more HD, and more channels for an even better price, the problem is that I have three other TV’s on analog that may not work, I will find out soon.

My Choice of Wireless service
I use T-mobile. They have far and wide coverage, great customer service and a plan that perfectly fits my lifestyle.  I have a family plan with 4 phones, that has unlimited texting, unlimited nights, unlimited weekends, unlimited in network calling, and each phone can pick their 5 favorites and call for free but the killer feature is that when I am near a hotspot (such as at home) my phone will connect using the Wi-Fi and all those minutes are free.  Because of so many free minutes I am on a plan with only 700 any time minutes, and we have never used more than 400 of them.  I get all of this for only $140 including taxes, and I have sub leased two of my phones for a total of $80 per month so my out of pocket cost is only $60 per month.   Quite nice.

My Choice of Cell phone
I have chosen the Samsung Katalyst, I have been a huge fan of Samsung phones for a few years now, they simply are much easier for me to understand.  I also love the slide feature, and the Wi-Fi compatibility that is a must for my service.  It has a nice crisp 2.1 inch screen, and has a great camera and a great music player with good sound.  Call quality and battery life is also excellent.

My Choice of Drinking Water
I choose Reverse Osmosis Water.  I like the clean taste.  I also like the fact that there is no fluoride in it.  I think fluoride is really a bad thing.  I get it from the local water store down the road and they charge only $1 for a 5 Gallon refill.  They have filters that are larger than my car and the taste is great.  I often fill up bottles with it and take it while I drive.

My Choice of Browser
I have chosen Firefox, it works great, and is much more stable than IE.  It also shows the websites better.  It has a ton of features I can set and generally work well.

Thanks for reading, be sure to post your answers also.

Freedom of speech and religion in the US.

blogs, Business, concepts, Marketing, Politics, The World, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

I often post long comments on a variety of subjects on other blogs.  Today one of my good friends Matthew posted a very good blog entry.  (See the photo to the right, taken on one of the few days when I had more hair them him.)  Here is his blog entry, if you could read that first it will make mine more logical. I mostly agreed with him and the subject of business came up in my answer so I will repost my reply here for all my business readers.

I once heard a quote that one who believes in freedom of speech “Will defend someone who is yelling at the top of their lungs their ideals in a public place, ideals which you would yell at the top of your lungs to oppose.”  I have thought about this often.  We live in a nation where we should have freedom of speech, and even if that speech is against what I say and think I will support that freedom.

Now it comes to appropriateness of the time and place it is a whole different mater.  I think that there is a huge difference between public and private events.  I thought it was shameful for those few democratic protestors to sneak into the republic convention and protest during the peaks of the speeches.  It was NOT their place.  I also think that if someone goes through all the trouble and expense to put on a parade (Such as a famous church does each St Patricks day.) they own that parade and they should be able to pick and choose who is allowed to be in their parade, not forced to allow a group of Homosexual rights people to basically have a protest in the middle of the parade as a court recently forced them to do.  If the Gays want to have their own parade, I have no problem with that, they can pick a different time or place.   Also if a pastor wants to say something to his church about who to vote for, he should be allowed, unlike todays laws.

On Friday I went to the state fair, there were two different church groups who rented a space there, they decided that they would try to tell people about God.  I also have no problem with this, they used their money, and they were following the rules.  Now was this the best place, I think not, will they actually do any good for the Kingdom of God, maybe they will make a few people think.  For years I have thought that relationships were the best way to win people to Christ.  You simply invite them to events, show them the community and tell them the Gospel and let them decide.  But any decision that is forced is NOT lasting or sincere, and so many Christians like to force such decisions.

If you notice in the quote you have from Thomas Jefferson he says sect.  As you know this is a difference within the same religion.  He could not imagine that our nation would be anything but Christian.  He just did not want one denomination to be favored over another.

I do totally agree that we should not force our Christian ideals on non Christians as a form of law.  There are too many laws in our nation.  We are NOT a free nation.  Anyone who leaves for a year or more and comes back will tell you that.  There are others that are less free but also others that are far more free.

You also had the point of the “Merry Christmas” greeting.  I have found that it is used far less.  The other day I went to Costco they had two isles of “Christmas” stuff, so I decided to look really closely, there was not one item that was Christian based, and not one location did it say the word Christmas.  They are a business, they can choose what to put on their shelves, but me, as a Christian can choose where I will buy my decorations, and even if they have the best price it will NOT be from them.  Two years ago I heard that Macy’s decided to make bring back Christmas and in all of their ads they stopped all of the holiday stuff that others do and actually, to the shock of the left, mentioned Christmas.  And you know what, their sales went way up and they had their best season ever.  These are all private originations, they can choose what they want to say, they will be held accountable by the general public for what they do and say though.

To me the fundamental thing is that we have LOST the conversation in this nation.  People are divided and in most ways very close minded.  The force of the debate on both sides has caused people to become callous to the point that they are stuck in what they think.  A hard attack will just cause people to put the shields up and resist, only a slow, over time conversation based on logic will ever convert most people in this climate.  (This is for every issue, religious, political and even for choice of OS.)

My new website

Business, Computers, Internet, Marketing, , , , , ,

Last most I got back into the business of creating websites.  I did this mostly because the hardware part of my business has gotten a bit slow recently.  I did a few websites for some of my customers.  There are still thousands of small businesses just in my city that STILL do not have websites.  It is crazy.

Anyway after doing a few of these sites I looked at my own site.  It was version 3 of the Emerald Computers site, I have had it for about 2 years.  It was very limiting because I was in a fixed width and fixed height template.  It limited how much content I could have on any one page.  I decided it did not look good enough for a company that was going to create websites, add to that it simply did not generate sales.  So I spent 3 days designing and building the New Emerald Computers site.  I found a nice template that I liked, but the menu was simply too small so I created a pull down menu, for the first time.  I also did a few other firsts on this website.  I built the entire site without using tables AT ALL.  Tables are so lame and hard to work with.  I also made the entire site with proper CSS, no more setting fonts in the text.  Something else I did, for the fourth time is that I divided the entire site up using PHP.  I have found that this makes it SO much easier to edit a site.  Everything is server side includes.  Most of the pages are 5-8 different PHP files spliced together, the server does all the work so the user can not even tell.  But what this lets me do is change just one file and all of my pages are changed.  Yes I KNOW this is not new, in fact this was been going on for 10 years, but I have only used it for 2 years.

On sunday I decided that the site was better than my old one, even though only 60% of the content was written so I deleted the old one and uploaded the new one.   I did something on this page I never did on any of my other pages, I put a call to action at the bottom of all the services pages.  A visitor simply can fill out a short form and then I can all them and set up a service call, it also has a link to our contact page.    I just did it because I thought it would be nice, but to my huge surprise I have had over 10% of the people who visited this page fill out the form, and I called them tuesday and two have been converted into sales!!!  WOW.  On top of that my volume of phone calls is up over 50%, with almost half of the calls mentioning my website.  This is crazy, I did not expect results this fast or this good.  Google still has not even indexed the new site.  I am working quickly to get the rest of the site down.  Yesterday I wrote a huge page about dropshipping, and I also wrote one about how to upgrade a computer.

I hope this keeps up, I will keep my readers informed.  By the way this is why I have been fairly quite on the blog, I am too busy with this to blog much, even though some really important stuff is going on.

When times are hard, barter works well.

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, ,

As my regular readers know well, I like to do computer things for people.  I have made my living from this for over a decade now.  In this tough time many people don’t have the money for my services, I am good at what I do so I charge for it.  So I decided last week to barter my services for those of other small businesses.  I can make great websites for business, and I can fix computers so that they are like new.

So I looked around for what I needed, I saw right away that I needed some yard work done (I am highly alergic to grass.)  I posted a small ad and the next day I had a landscaper call me, he needed his wifes computer to be fixed and the best quote he received was $150.  So he is going to come here in the morning and do 2-3 hours of yard work for me to remove some adware and install a few programs on his wife’s computer.  Good deal for me.  Trade 2 hours of my time doing something I like to do for 3 hours of something I hate to do, it is also a winning situation for Chris, the landscape guy, he just does 3 hours of work and saves himself $150.

I decided to take it to the next level, I found a company that will go in your attic and put this foil stuff down so on the hot Arizona days 95% of the heat is kept out of your house.  The materials and labor for a house my size is about $2,000.  I talked to them today and I am going to build a 10 page website for the materials guy and a 3 page site for the installer and I will get what I need for FREE.  They say this should save me at least $100 a month during the summer.

I am also working on my wife’s OB/GYN so that all of our prenatal care for my second child will be free, at least the part that insurance does not cover.  She is in need of a website.

I need some work done on my roof, I need new paint for my house.  I would like some rooms painted.  I am in talks for all of these things.

Once you start looking around and asking for such things you really start to find some great places.  Also what is nice is that I don’t barter with hardware so when they buy hardware I still get paid.  Also, when I have done this in the past they usually buy much more from me than I buy from them so I get a new customer and I get something done that I needed and I still make a profit.  It works well, and I suggest that every small business owner try it out.

(On a side note, I have seen many formal barter systems, and they don’t work, I would avoid them.)