Blog Entries

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 [...]

AMA versus SEOLinkVine

srini@simplosys.com — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0100

There are several posts all over the web about both of these services. But not many report on actual performance or results from them.

A quick background first.

AMA - ArticleMarketingAutomation.com

SEOLinkVine (SLV) - SEOLinkVine.com

Both are services that help advertisers syndicate articles to multiple blogs. For bloggers, it often represents free guest posts, although, there are some (or rather many) bloggers on these networks that create entire blogs based ent [...]

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 [...]

CRE Loaded Gift Vouchers Certificates - Some help

srini@simplosys.com — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:00:00 +0100

It's amazing how little info there is out there about CRE Loaded features/hacks. The book that costs $40 hardly covers anything in depth.

Here's a conversation about setting up gift certificates or vouchers on your site. If you have a CRE Loaded site, you should set this up. It's free, and just one more way that you can market your site by giving away free gift certificates to bloggers and popular social media account owners in exchange for a review or promotion [...]

Tim Seymour Rocks

srini@simplosys.com — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Yeah yeah this blog is not about stocks, but well, who isn't interested in shares at some point or the other? If you aren't investing them yourself, and trust someone else to handle your money matters, good for you, ignore this post.

For those like me that try to dabble in everything and think men aren't just work machines and the concept of a career doesn't sink in too well, you are into stocks then, aren't you?

I've been following CNBC Fast Money a [...]

Link Networks - the ONLY way you can really profit from them

srini@simplosys.com — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Over the last couple of years, frustrated webmasters that have tried all other SEO measures unsuccessfully (or with partial but not significant success) have turned to link networks to build links very fast very quickly.

I am talking about sites like articlemarketingautomation.com , seolinkvine.com (which launched today - Brad Callen's latest venture), Etc. There are many more. The idea is thatyou are part of a network where your articles/blog posts with links to your sites a [...]

Entrepreneur Quiz

srini@simplosys.com — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Check out this entrepreneur quiz . I got only a 27 on this, which according to them, means I may not enough of the characteristics of a typical entrepreneur.

Some of the questions really did make a lot of sense. While I was answering them, I could see what they were getting at, and sometimes, sadly, why my response is not the one an ideal successful entrepreneur would provide. I guess reminded me that there is SO MUCH more to being a successful entrepreneur than having the right i [...]

Zecco Zimulator iz Zead

srini@simplosys.com — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Zecco.com is my favorite stock trading platform . $4.50 trades can't be beat. And I am not a day trader so I don't care if they take 3 days to transfer money in and out or don't offer the absolute best rates (which I don't know if they do or not) or don't offer the industry best trading software (which I don't think they do). Their forums are good, and customer service is decent. And the site is always up - never had any issues with unreliable service or downtime. So [...]

Gmail detects missing attachment - that just ROCKS

srini@simplosys.com — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Guys at Outlook, Yaho0 - look and learn!! This is my favorite thing about Gmail - if I say the words "is attached" in my email and forget to add the attachment, Gmail shows me a popup asking me if I did indeed forget an attachment. How cool is that? Such a simple feature - I am sure it's like one line of code. But it's awesome. Small wins - low hanging fruit, call it what you want, but this is THE deal in my opinion. A company that thinks like that must have some great peopl [...]

CRE Loaded Coupons Module is Broken

srini@simplosys.com — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Srini Venkataramani: My site is live at razzamatazz.net. Coupons are giving me trouble. The first three worked and there were several redemptions too. But then I tried to add one last night and I kept getting an error "This coupon could be used 0 times" or similar.

Srini Venkataramani: If I raised the coupon usage limit to 100, it would still not take the coupon and produce an error "this coupon could only be used 100 times" but the coupon obviously wasn't [...]

New Google Apps Marketplace

srini@simplosys.com — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Yet another Google innovation...and this one has some promise - one of the better releases from Google in the recent past. Buzz was pretty good, but is unlikely to change Facebook or Twitter's domination in my opinion. Anyway, I digress.

The Google Apps Marketplace holds the promise of bringing Enterprise Class apps to customers via Google Apps. More integration is good. There are a million web apps out there. This one will help bring more into the Google Apps framework.

[...]

Lesson to learn from Qualcomm's BREW

srini@simplosys.com — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

I invest in Qualcomm stock so I follow their news - and read this REALLY interesting piece today about them that talks about how BREW - Qualcomm's mobile phone software platform for "NON-smart phones" registered sales of $3B through its applications . But the interesting piece was that there are only 18,000 apps in the BREW platform as of now, and only a small number of these are popular. Assuming 10k successful applications, and averaging the $3 billion across the 10k apps, tha [...]

Joomla upgrade - not as easy as most people would think..

srini@simplosys.com — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 can be an ordeal. There are tons of sites that provide info on how to do this but very few seem to really nail down the BIG TICKET items - the stuff that is almost guaranteed to give you problems. At least I didn't find any. So here you go. There are still plenty of of 1.0 sites out there so hopefully this will help some:

o. Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 is NOT straightforward and something that you can follow a script and complete. I wou [...]

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 [...]