Blog Entries for admin

When to Invest In Real Estate - Simple logical rule to guide your decision

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:00:00 +0100

People often over-estimate the returns from real estate in their mind. A house that they bought for $100,000 in 1985 that has appreciated 6 times in price and costs $60,000 now only returned 7.18% annually. If a house doubles in value every 10 years, that just means the annual rate of return is 7.18%. Doubling every 10 years is the most that can be expected from real estate, that's if you are lucky.

Use this calculator to see for yourself.

http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator [...]

Simple SEO blueprint - Three Steps to Simple SEO

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Don't let people make SEO a big messy maze. It's not. It's simple, if you keep it simple. At Simplosys, we like simple. So much so that we named the company after that :)

Now, this doesn't mean it's EASY. There's a difference. The concept is simple. Which is what you need to understand. VERY well. Then the implementation will depend on how well you execute the simple concept. But if your understanding of the basic concept is flawed, you'll never get results, [...]

Is Long Term Investing Dead?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Tons of people, including greats such as Warren Buffett (who actually invented the concept) recommend value investing. The idea of buying shares of companies that are fundamentally sound, but trading well below their actual long term potential. Sounds great in theory and has worked well over the years, for one simple reason - the overall market grew as well at a pretty reasonable pace. So if you simply bought the market (sau DJI index fund) and stayed with it for 10 years, from any period bet [...]

5 Tips to stay friends with article directories

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Article Marketing is perhaps the easiest and most common form of link building. Everyone does it. Either themselves or through their SEO or a link building service. There is nothing wrong with it when it's done right and in moderation.

One problem with article marketing is that it's difficult to measure results right away. Directories take days or even weeks to approve an article and this can make it hard to know whether your submission was right, was approved, Etc., especially [...]

Allow a professional to trade in your stock trading account

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Fidelity, Scottrade, Schwab and most other large trading brokerage firms allow multi-user accounts these days. This is something that I did not know and thought I should share with you guys because you may benefit from this too.

Read this conversation which explains it pretty well. This was with Fidelity but should work in a similar fashion with other brokerages.

Always remember NOT to trust just anyone, needless to say, your buddy or uncle doesn't qualify (unless he/she also [...]

Isn't this interesting?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0100

According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the research and support of entrepreneurship, in the past decade the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those between 55 and 64 years old. According to the study, "The 20 to 34 age bracket...which we usually identify with risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google(GOOG Quote)), has the lowest rate."

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10669129/1/retire-or-start- [...]

Is your business collecting the right sales tax?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0100

http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources/article.php/3656806

This is an EXCELLENT piece - precise and informative on when, why and how to go about collecting sales tax on your ecommerce sales. If you have a website and are selling anything "tangible" on it then most likely you need to pay sales tax in one more more jurisidictions. Even if you sell something intangible such as digital products - ebooks or software, you still need to pay sales taxes in some states.

& [...]

Call-Me-800 International Call Forwarding Review

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0100

I've been dabbling with the idea of setting up several 1-800 numbers for customer support for my Ecommerce sites. I am based out of San Diego CA but my staff is all over the world. So that makes that whole process a bit more complicated - at least that's what I used to think.

First thought was to do that with Vonage or other VoIP service. But given the poor Internet bandwidth that my Indian and Phillipine office gets, that was out of the question almost right away. Not worth the [...]

Offer based link building

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0100

Five-six years ago, people hadn't still figured out the Google formula as clearly. Good ol' dark ages when SEO was a term not many even knew about. Times when you could rank high with just a few links from random sites via link exchanges. Times that have changed for the better now.

Now, link exchanges are almost a thing of the past. They still work and are beneficial to get direct traffic but getting links from links pages with tons of other links are not really that helpf [...]

Simple website contest ideas

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0100

Contests make for great SEO! We talked about Hosting Contests to Generate Links earlier and we've seen this work more and more. Here are some ideas to host contests that serve more than one purpose.

1. Caption contest

Put up a funny picture relevant to your website. Then invite your visitors to log in to your site (there you go, more registered users) and write a caption for that image (more content). Have others vote for the best caption (more user interaction) and then [...]

I love the new yahoo mail - September 18, 2009

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0100

I love it! Slicker, faster, and more integrated with the rest of Yahoo.

Now only if Yahoo actually made similar progress on their Calendar tool, I'd be in love with them even more.

I've always thought that Yahoo kicks google's ass when it comes to mail. Gmail is the most confusing email client I've seen. The only thing it does better than Yahoo mail is faster results on maibox searches. But yahoo takes just a few fractions of a second longe [...]

Tradekey.com - what a concept - but wait..

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0100

As I wrote on my previous post - 2009 Internet Sales Trends for Specialty Stores, I've been thinking about ideas on how to source goods and sell them online ourselves. We specialize in figuring out what to sell and to estimate demand for products on the Internet. For any ecommerce business, really, to me, it boils down to -

- Decide on what to offer (this is the hardest part)

- Establish reliable supply chain

- Market the product online and drive traffic to the sit [...]

2009 Internet Sales Trends for specialty online stores

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:00:00 +0100

As a small business that helps companies establish their brand online and drive traffic to their sites, we spend a very large portion of our time analyzing Internet search traffic and sales trends on sales of things that our clients sell.

Over time, we've noticed some very interesting facts. For instance, in the present year 2009 and last year (2008), we've seen a significant increase in the number of people buying things online. OK, that's what everyone says and reports bu [...]

Yugma sucks! - client.properties error message

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0100

Yugma online web conferencing tool showed promise. Some of my colleagues have used it with great results and it costs lesser than webex or gotomeeting. It also has a free version if you are not interested in changing presenter or using their online collaboration tools such as whiteboarding, multiple user mouse pointers, Etc. Fair enough. You get what you pay for and just getting basic online screen sharing for free, that too, along with Skype Integration through its Yugma Skype SE is pr [...]

Web CEO Keyword Research Tool SUCKS

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0100

I am using Web CEO for the first time to optimize a few sites for one of our clients - they specifically wanted us to use this tool, so we obliged. The very first thing I started on was the keyword research portion. I've used IBP, SEO Elite, Wordtracker, Google KW Tool Etc. in the past so I know a thing or two about keyword research.

Web CEO looks up keywords from your page and lists them. You then pick the ones you want and analyze them. It comes back with Keyword results such as "Daily Worl [...]

Invest first or sell first?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:00:00 +0100

Every company has to invest into capital - human and technology at some point in the hope that it will bring them additional sales and revenue and allow them to grow. Sometimes, that decision can be a difficult one though, especially in an economy like today's. Some clients are closing shops, which means lost business for all their vendors. Some lines of businesses that we are currently staffed for aren't doing as well as other lines of businesses that we want to launch but that would [...]

Wordpress discussion forum options really limited

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0100

There are several options for integrating a discussion forum into your wordpress blog.

bbpress:

Pros: The one to watch out for. Integrates closely with wordpress. Makers of wordpress are closely involved with the development of this software. Actively developed.

Cons:

1. The stable version does not integrate with wordpress 2.6 or higher. Generally speaking, the stable version seems to lag behind wordpress stable version by at least a few months. So, if you have [...]

Worked!!! Xmap extension for Joomla MyBlog Component

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:00:00 +0100

I've written earlier about how finding and getting a Blog component to work in Joomla hasn't been the smoothest experience . I tried MojoBlog initially, then painfully switched over to MyBlog and spent a considerable amount of time making it work in my currents setup. One of my biggest pain points was that none of the Joomla Sitemap components would work too well with MyBlog - they would just not pick up the URL's. Anyone that knows anything about SEO knows that a sitemap is very [...]

Chat Transcript with ProFollow.com - Aweber Reseller

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:00:00 +0100

In my previous post I had explained how selecting an autoresponder is not an easy decision and can often costs hundreds of dollars per month. I had concluded with a statement about Profollow . This post has my chat transcript with the Profollow people. This might be a good solution for those looking for a low cost autoresponder to start with.

Srini: Are you guys an Aweber reseller? How is profollow different than Awerber then? Do I get access to all the tracking and analytics f [...]

Aweber vs Getresponse? Actually, profollow might be the best one.

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:00:00 +0100

Selecting your Email Marketing provider is a VERY important decision any website or online business will make. Why? Because once you make your pick, it is VERY difficult to change the provider if you decide to change your mind in the future. I know what you are thinking. You could always export your list to Excel or CSV and import it into another list management product, right? Yes, but there's a catch. Most list management software require your subscribers to opt in again when you import [...]