technology

The reality is that many of the products on the internet are utter crap. I find this to be especially true in the field of internet marketing. Many people come to the internet and get captured by the idea of ​​making some extra money or even getting rich. They start to buy products and programs that not only make themselves no money they keep taking money from them.

It is not easy to identify inferior products in advance. Because almost all advertising puts the best possible face forward, one should always be skeptical and assume that the product will not deliver as well as promised. However, there comes a point where the hype becomes deception. In general I find deceptive programs and / or products fall into one of three categories. Just being aware of these categories can help you spot them.

1. The Empty Box: With these products you find that when you actually get the product there is not much there. Now to be fair, usually the box is not completely empty. There is "something there." But what is there is minimal and is not the wonderful product that you had anticipated based on the advertisement. Then, you are expected to make money by selling this empty box to others. I have ethical problems with doing such a thing.

2. The Pyramid Scheme: Like chain letters and gift clubs, online versions of this claim to make money by getting a large number of people under you who will ever send you large amounts of money. Usually only those at the very top make money and at times they make a killing, while the rest of the people in the pyramid make little or lose a lot. Usually the online pyramid scheme, like the offline chain letter, contains an empty box product, so nothing of true value is being sold. Legitimate multi-level marketing programs have a pyramid format, but there are two important differences. First, in such legitimate programs there is a legitimate product of value being sold. Second, with legitimate programs there will be a fair distribution of the profits through the pyramid. Pyramid schemes are illegal and so to get around this, bad programs promote a box that is not completely empty. I am not a lawyer and so in no way am I making a legal judgment.

3. The Inferior Product: Many internet products fail to live up to their hype. However, some products fall so short that the hype is nothing but a lie.

Being aware of these three categories will help you to avoid wasting your money on bad products. However, sales pages can make the stinkers smell sweet. Consequently, your best advice is to check out review pages where experts have tried out the products for you and then give you honest reviews. …

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Someone once said that leading a group of people is like herding cats. In my experience, managing a band is like herding a thousand rabid and delirious cats. One has to worry about finances, promoting the band, booking shows, and managing the relationships between members. And that’s all before you consider the extra responsibilities of musicianship when the manager is ALSO a contributing member of the band.

Financial management is something that most indie bands forget about, yet it’s probably the single most important skill to have. Everything revolves around money; merchandise, payment from gigs, recording, etc. Having the right person to handle the money, even if it is not the main “band manager”, is paramount to the band’s long-term success. It would be a huge inconvenience to travel to an away gig and need to make an emergency purchase, only to find out the the band’s bank account is overdrawn! Even if you aren’t great with numbers, but are still handling the money, there are countless software tools out there to help you keep track of purchases and income for the band.

Many bands simply promote shows as they come up, but an effective band manager will have a long-term and short-term plan of action for promotional purposes. This might mean scheduling interviews with radio stations or magazines, organizing giveaways for fans, or coming up with printed material and demo CDS to distribute ahead of shows in new markets to build up a fanbase. With the advent of the internet, Twitter, and Facebook, promotional tasks are significantly easier, but there are a LOT more bands promoting in the method. It’s imperative that your promotional material be fresh and unique so that it will stand out from the crowd.

Booking shows can be an easy and rewarding tasks, or something that is done only because you absolutely must. The key to making it easy is effective contact management. Many contact management programs also will let you search geographically, making booking gigs really easy since you can “search nearby”. Another thing to incorporate is a simple booking agreement. Booking agreements protect you from sleazy establishments that may try to not pay or double-book performers (both of which have personally happened to me). It gives you a defined agreement that is enforceable by law if things go awry.

Bands will always have internal drama, whether it’s someone’s lack of self-practice or that thing that someone said to someone else. It’s a manager’s job to keep everyone happy enough to not quit, but it’s also NOT his job to be a parent. Sometimes, you have to let some things play themselves out. However, if a situation appears to be affecting the well-being of the band as a whole, it’s time to step in and take control, doing whatever you need to do to rectify the situation. Just take care and use caution not to implicitly take sides; simply act as a mediator. The reason is that you want to build people’s trust in …

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In any business focussing on cost, price and sales volume will dramatically improve cash flow and profit. There are a number of articles in this series on how to improve prices and sales volume but cost control is an ingoing internal matter that all your collections should be participating in.

Ask your accountant to create a spreadsheet of all your cost categories. Let's just pick three: IT, cleaning, raw materials.

Create a spreadsheet with the costs of each of these three for the last year displayed. Now involve your staff in some creative thinking about how each of them can reduce one of those categories by just 1%. Anyone can achieve a 1% improvement but if you asked them for a 10% improvement they would all say it is impossible. But a lot of 1% cost reductions rapidly add up to 10%. This is extra money straight onto your profit.

Let's start with IT. How much equipment do you have, is it all necessary? One monochrome laser printer would be more cost effective than colored ink jet or laser document production. Can you store your information in the Internet Cloud rather than on your own servers. Let the Cloud providers run the virus control eliminating the need for you to worry about that cost. Do you have in house IT personnel, if so would it be cheaper to hire them in on a needs only basis?

Create a Bubble Map of all the ideas your staff come up with then pick the immediate winning ideas and implement these cost savings immediately.

Similarly on your office cleaning bill, when did you last negotiate the cleaning contract or ask for other quotes.

If you are a manufacturer then your raw material costs will probably be constantly under review. But call your production staff together for an ideas session for a morning on how to reduce scrap by just 1%. I did this once on three plastics extrusion lines and hundreds of ideas were put forward to improve efficiencies. Record every idea, then start with the easiest to show some quick hits. This will energize everyone to continue working on the more difficult cost improvement challenges.

If you invite your work force to come up with ideas to just save 1% of costs, improve prices by 1% and sales volume by 1% then profit could immediately improve by 10%. Everyone is capable of seeing a way of improving at least one of these variables by 1%. …

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