Tag Archives: google

Don’t make the geeks mad!

Arizona, Bootstrap, Business, Computers, Entrepreneurship, How To, Internet, Marketing, , ,

The world is moving to the internet, and more and more people research things before they plan to spend money. The smart company manages their online presence with a good website, SEO, and they ask clients who are happy to leave positive feedback for them on one of the many sites that have been created to rate companies.

Most of these sites really use this as a way to find companies to sell advertising to but that is a whole different blog. I have been helping a few companies get online recently. Last month I helped a company with a fairly negative review history to create a new blog, website and then create profiles on many of these pages. I then created a page that he can send happy clients to so that they can review him. It makes the world better, he will feel more responsible to make people happy, and these happy clients will send more clients to him to make him more successful. Everyone is happy. He now gets a client or so per week from the web.

The odd thing is that many of these businesses have little or no knowledge of these online boards, that vast majority of business owners are oblivious, and sometimes it is really to their determent. I have seen time and time again companies that have a large number of negative reviews, often right on Google maps (The number one way people find you). A business may see 100 clients in a day but many of them won’t even receive 10 reviews in a year, and when 8 of them come from ANGRY and RANTING clients, that business will see very little traffic from people who research online.

Being a geek and knowing the power of this, I know that you NEVER want to make a geek mad at your business. One good geek can really hurt your online presence, a few and you are dead online. Geeks know this, and sometimes they even use to to hurt your business if you are their competition.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9mCS9H9Lo
This computer repair guy really must have made someone mad, he has pages full of bad reviews about his company. Click HERE to see for yourself.

Also see MY PAGE.  I had one fake, negative review, so I asked my Facebook friends who were clients in the past to post an honest review for my company.  Look at the results.

 

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.

The secret to getting the BEST deal on your next computer.

Business, Computers, concepts, Entrepreneurship, , , , , , , , , ,

This is part of my Computer series of blog entries, click here for the others.

Ok almost everyone, and every business needs a computer to do their day to day business. For most people a computer is a large purchase.  For some businesses that buy hundreds of computers it can be a major part of their budget.  So getting a good price on this major purchase is very important.

What I am about to tell you is a secret that the people in the computer industry do not want you to know, in fact when I was running my retail store I have fired people for telling customer this.  The secret is this, computers are very easy to build, and you can buy the parts directly and shave off 30-50% of your purchase price.  It has always been cheaper to build your own but recently it has become very easy.  The parts are designed to work together, and you can mix/match them almost any way you like.

If you think that this is an off the wall idea then you would be very wrong.  The large computer companies are called Tier 1 Companies in the industry.  The rest of the companies that sell over 100,000 computers a year are called Tier 2 Companies.  The rest are simply called White Box, the industry word for Generic.  For the last 5 years the white box makers have been gaining market share, according to intel they sold over 57% of their CPUs in the white box channel.  During this same time the number of computer stores has fallen dramaticlly.  So how can this be, the answer is because millions of people and business are building their own computers.  The number one largest user of computers in the world, Google, has never purchased a server or workstation, they have built them all.  Microsoft is the same way, so is many of the fortune 500 companies, and millions of smaller businesses.  Many shop online, or they go to stores that sell parts.  Fry’s Electronics has built an empire on this with mega computer stores selling parts, but Frys is over priced, has very little help and it is hard to return things to them so I would never suggest you buy from them.  The best bet is your local computer company, if you are in Arizona call on us to provide your hardware, if you are outside of AZ you can still call us for advise, we can even tell you where to get the best deals online.  It is now said that as many as 1/3rd of all new computers are built by the end user, so why are you not doing it.  Let me tell you how.

So here is how you do it. First you need to buy the parts.  Only buy new products from a good company and you will be good.  Pick out the CPU you like, I usually suggest AMD because they are good, but in reality it matters little, as for most people any $80 cpu will do.  Now you get a motherboard that supports the CPU, just look for any new one that has the same socket.  I like MSI the best for motherboards, they are high quality and well priced. Basically every new computer uses DDR2 memory, so buy that, I would get at least 2GB if you plan to use vista.  Next you need a hard drive, again for most people just get the size you need then find the best price.  For most businesses the 160GB is the best to shoot for.  I like WD for the brand but others will also do, just make sure it is SATA.  Now you need a optical drive, I suggest a DVD burner, they do everything and only cost a bit more.  I usually suggest people get a card reader for all that digital memory.  Last you need a case to put the whole thing into.  The case will come with the powersupply and most will be good for basic systems, for really advanced systems with lots of extras a good powersupply is a good investment. That is it, you have everything you need to get started.  Guess what, you can do all this for well under $250.

Now lets talk about ad ons.  For most business systems you really don’t need a video card, just get a motherboard that has one on board.  You only need a video card if you want to run two monitors or if you play 3D video games.  If you play games then there is much more to consider, I will talk about that at a later time, but mostly this is a business blog.  You may also want a new keyboard, mouse, speakers or monitor with your new computer.

When you get all the parts simply open the case and start putting everything in.  I suggest putting the drives in first, then the motherboard, then the CPU, RAM and connect all the wires.  Don’t force things but use firm pressure where needed.  The hardest part is connecting the case wires to the motherboard, but there is a chart in the motherboard book if you get lost.  Next you boot on your OS disk, install the OS, then install the drivers.

Doing all of this may take 3-4 hours the first time but you should save at least 300-500 by doing this, and for most people they don’t get paid $300 for 4 hours of work.  For a business that is buying 20 computers they probably just saved over $8,000 and even if they don’t want to build the computers they can hire someone to be an IT person for a month for way less than that much.

By building the computer you also will get some added benifits, first the parts are much higher quality then most name brand computers.  Next if anything goes wrong with the computers you have common parts that are easy to replace, unlike the pripority computer parts most large companies sell.  Lastly you get a clean OS installed, without all of that added on spam and advertising that the large companies put on all their computers.

So next time you need a computer buy the parts and build it, you get a much better deal that way, even if you need to hire an expert to help you.