Dennis Champion

Martes, Hulyo 7, 2015

Using Solar Power in Your Home

Residential solar power is becoming an attractive option for many people. They can use the sun’s energy to operate various devices and to heat their homes. It is also earth-friendly and economical way to bring the power in your home. Solar energy can help reduce external energy consumption by 50-70 percent. There are several different ways you can use solar energy in your home, which may include the use of solar panels and solar thermal systems to produce electricity.

Once you have installed solar power in your home, you can use water heated by solar energy to produce hot water and heat your home. There will be a collector mounted on an elevated area, such as the roof, and is used to absorb thermal energy from the sun. Often increases the heat and stores the resulting hot water. This heat can be piped through radiators to heat the house and provide hot water. Besides reducing your electricity bills, it can add value to your home if you decide to sell your home.

The main reason why many people are using residential solar power is helping to reduce the cost of their utility bills. Depending on the type of solar system used in a dozen years, the solar panels can pay for themselves. The Department of Energy United States hopes that by 2020, solar energy will become common place in homes. They also expect to see the normal cut energy consumption by seventy percent in that time.

The solar electric panel is the technology used in solar power, which uses photons to produce electricity. Solar electric panels, known as photovoltaic panels (PV) can be installed in a variety of ways, such as:

• Free standing rigid sheets
• Adjust your ceiling
• peel and stick laminate

How dependent are installed ceiling. The captured energy is converted into electricity through a modified grid system. It has an installed meter that reads the amount of solar energy used in your home compared to normal electricity used. The meter will then subtract the power of solar energy is used and what is left is then applied to your electric bill.

Most solar energy systems that are used are also able to store some of the energy they generate so if there is a surplus of energy can be used at a later time. Besides using the stored energy to generate rooms hot water and heat, it can also supply for other electronic equipment and light your home. The main cost of solar energy is the cost of installing the system and solar panels.

Lunes, Hulyo 6, 2015

6 Ways to Make the Most of Your Site Navigation

6 Ways to Make the Most of Your Site Navigation written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Your website is one of the most important aspects of your business. If done correctly, it’s the first thing people see about your brand or product. Unless you’re such a well-known brand that people don’t have to search online to find out about, then you should make sure your website is not only a sales tool but a resource for your potential customers.

Fill your website up with good content, about your product, about your company, about your process, about how to use your product or service effectively. Then, make it easy to find.

When you consider your website, take a look at your navigation. A bad navigation could ruin the fact that you have tons of great content on your site by making it too much work for your website visitors to find. When creating a good navigation, there are several things you can consider:

1) Who is looking at this page?

The audience for your website and specific pages is perhaps the most important thing to look at when considering your navigation. Put yourself in their shoes. What would they be looking for? What information do they need served to them via a sidebar or header navigation?

Additional supporting information should be easily accessed. In this case, someone might want more related videos or they might want to go ahead and attend an upcoming training.

2) Is there related information that should be easily accessed from this page?

When someone visits this page and consumes the information, what other information do they need to supplement this information? Are there questions they might have to follow up on the information they’ve just consumed?

3) Is your content clearly labeled?

This one should be a no-brainer! However, it’s not. Ensure that you aren’t using industry slang unless your content is focused only on people in your industry. Make sure that when someone clicks on a label, the content that you then serve to visitors is what they expect to see associated with that label, and vice versa. Ensure that the content you have is labeled in an easy-to-search-for-and-find-way.

4) What are the key elements you want customers to see when visiting your site?

When people get to your site, what is it that you want them to find?
There should be a clear main point for your website and business. If you have other lines of business or supporting points, make them prominent as well. What options is it that you want people to have as soon as they get to your site?

5) Is your contact information easily accessible?

There’s a good chance that when someone visits your site, they will need to access your contact information. They might need to shoot you an email, call or even know your location and hours. Make this information clear. Don’t make your website visitors search for this information.

Add a sign-up to your newsletter in the sidebar navigation to make the call to action clear, noticeable and easy to find.

6) What call to action is your page looking to incite?

Extremely important, what do you want your site visitors to do when they consume the content on each page? Some pages might want you to watch a video, while some might be more compatible to get visitors to sign up for an email list. A downloadable eBook might be the goal of your information. Whatever your call to action is, the navigation is a great place for it.

Your navigation might just be something that you install as a necessity, but if you put a little bit of thought and strategy around it, you’ll find it can be one of your greatest online assets.

Kala Linck is the Community and Content Manager at Duct Tape Marketing. You can find her blogging her travels, praying for summer or tweeting about marketing, coffee and cats @tadasunshine.

Top Measures To Improve Sender Reputation & Email Deliverability

Email marketing is one of the most effective tactics for driving sales and generating new leads. Your success depends on your ability to reach your customer’s inbox. Once you hit send, your emails go through multiple testing paths. The better your reputation as a sender, the more emails get delivered into the inbox.

Managing your sender reputation is vital to ensuring your messages are delivered reliably. Email deliverability is an issue faced by many companies depending on email to send important messages to their customers. Over 20% of acceptable emails, including email & shipping confirmations and password resets never reach the recipient’s inbox.

Let us look at some important factors driving sender reputation:

Complaints

Complaints occur when the subscriber marks an email as spam or moves it into their junk folder. A high complaint rate can block your emails and can cause a bad sending reputation. It is calculated by dividing the number of complaints by the number of delivered messages.

How to reduce your complaint rate?

Stick to the type of content for which your subscribers have opted in.
Target your subscribers based on their interests. They are likely to unsubscribe if your email doesn't bring any value to them.
Send emails at a right frequency, as forgetful customers tend to unsubscribe more.
Check your acquisition and permission practices for opting in your customers.
Make the unsubscribe process easier so as to avoid complaints.

A few complaints will not hamper your reputation as it may just be some lazy unsubscribes. It is better to keep these complaints below a threshold. For example, Return Path provides comparative data to the ISPs to decide the acceptable limit for complaints.

Unknown Users

Sending your marketing emails to non-existing users makes no sense and also adds to bounce rate. An unknown user is generated when you send mail to a recipient that never existed, inactive users or an address abandoned by the subscriber. Check your email list regularly for misspelled, inactive email addresses to filter out all inactive users. You can also find unknown users by identifying the SMTP error codes. Keep this rate to a minimum to build sender credibility.

How to avoid it?

Remove the hard bounces from your list and regularly monitor the soft bounces.
Review your email collection process and ask users to confirm their email address.
Monitor the feedback loops and analyze the SMTP error logs. Major ISPs provide feedback loops, in which the sender can gain information from the recipients who have complained about that sender’s email.

Spam Traps

These are the email addresses which are specifically created for the purpose of finding spammers. These should not be found on any of your opt-in lists. Hotmail postmaster Travis Wetherbee describes a spam trap as “one of the most widely exploited fraud management tools utilized by Internet Service Providers (ISPs)."

There are two primary types of spam traps employed by ISPs that have an impact on sender score reputation: Pure spam traps and Recycled spam traps. Pure spam traps are the addresses created for the sole purpose of catching spammers. They have never been used as an active email address and can create deliverability issues. Recycled spam traps are the email addresses that were once owned by individuals. After a period of inactivity, the ISP will turn the account off and return hard bounce or SMTP errors. Some addresses are reactivated by ISPs for spam traps.

How can you avoid spam traps?

Do not purchase email lists.
Remove disengaged subscribers – monitor email addresses that become inactive.
Avoid sending messages to role accounts (i.e. sales@company.com, customerservice@company.com).
Efficiently remove hard bounces and utilize suppression lists for every campaign.

Volume of Email Sent

Volume is another factor in improving sender score. According to Return Path, “Volume refers to the numbers of emails seen by the reputation network over the past seven days and it focus on sending patterns, consistency, and cadence." Hence, you should avoid the unusual spikes in your email traffic. For example, if an IP address sends 1 million emails every month and all of a sudden the number increases to 12 million, it can hurt your sender reputation.

Is reputation tied to your sending IP address or your domain?

Presently, most ISPs are using IP addresses, but in the near future it may shift to an IP/domain pairing to determine reputation. Authentication will help ISPs assign reputations more precisely, by tying this reputation to both sender IP addresses and sender domains.

Email marketing can do wonders to your business only when those emails are delivered. Your sending reputation is the main element in getting high inbox placement rates.

The Complete Guide To Reddit Ads

As the self-styled 'front page of the internet', Reddit is one of the fundamental drivers of internet culture and as such, is undoubtedly a very tough nut to crack in terms of marketing to its userbase. Last year though, Reddit's execs got serious about the decision to monetise the business and so now is definitely […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

The Complete Guide To Reddit Ads

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Written by Joe Cox, Bespoke Digital.

The post The Complete Guide To Reddit Ads appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.

Shyp expands Goodwill partnership from SF to LA, NYC, and Miami

Are you interested in giving away all your stuff to those in need? On-demand shipping company Shyp has revived its partnership with Goodwill, and over the next month, it will do pick ups of donated items in not only San Francisco but also Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami. Donate all you want with no pick-up fees.

As mentioned, this isn’t the first time that Shyp is doing such a good charitable campaign. This partnership started out in San Francisco, and the company said that during the course of the promotion’s month, Shyp customers donated 21.5 tons (approximately 43,000 pounds) of items.

Customers donate now by updating the Shyp app on their iPhone or Android device. You’ll have to select Goodwill as the recipient. Within 20 minutes, a courier should show up at your door and take your haul away. However, here’s the one catch: Shyp wants you to limit your items to clothes, personal items, and things that can fit in the backseat of a four-door automobile. Unfortunately, it won’t accept any oversized items — and don’t even think about giving them your trash.

Shyp’s partnership is definitely a good thing — we all have that stockpile of things just sitting in our homes that we want to donate but just don’t have the time to do that. Now there’s more an incentive to do so.

Goodwill has done an interesting thing tapping into the on-demand economy to help facilitate donations. It also did a partnership with Uber earlier this year to help those cleaning out their closets.

If you miss out on Shyp’s donation, you can still use the service to deliver your unwanted items to the charity group — you just will have to pay the pick-up fee.

More information:

VB’s research team is studying mobile user acquisition: Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.

More information:

VB Webinar: Is CMO vs. CIO the new Sales vs. Marketing?

If you’re not reaching, engaging, and monetizing customers on mobile, you’re likely losing them to someone else. Register now for the 8th annual MobileBeat, July 13-14, where the best and brightest will be exploring the latest strategies and tactics in the mobile space.

VB WEBINAR:

Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, July 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.

For decades, sales teams and marketing teams have been at loggerheads over the most divisive of items.

The humble “lead.”

Sales constantly says that “marketing don’t produce high quality leads for us to close,” and marketing exclaim that “the sales team couldn’t close a barn door.”

Those battlegrounds have raged for years, and only in recent times have the two departments started to see eye-to-eye, thanks to an increased use of data and analytics (a leveler if there ever was one), and a new age of cooperation.

The battle, it seems, is over.

Maybe, but there’s a new power struggle within the corner offices of corporate America that is only just getting started.

The current wave started when Gartner predicted that the CMO will spend more money on IT than the CIO by 2017. Of course, not everyone shares that view.

Forrester Research analyst Peter Burris told the CIO Journal that “70 percent of IT spending is on maintaining and upgrading existing systems. That leaves only 30 percent for new systems; even if the entire balance of that were allocated to marketing, it would be a very long time before spending on new systems would overtake spending on legacy systems.”

When it comes to budgets, spending, control of IT systems, and determining who is best placed to make those decisions, it is clear there is a lot at stake.

That’s why later this week I’ll be posing questions to a panel of experts in the hope that, between us, we can share how CMOs and CIOs alike can avoid a replay of the Sales vs. Marketing battle that plagued the productivity of many, and reversed the fortunes of some.

Don’t miss out!

Register here for free.

What you’ll learn:

How to identify problem communication areas within your organization that can lead to internal war
How to speak fluent CIO, and discover your inner process junkie
Exciting acronyms, and find out why they’re deadly important to your continue growth
Why fluidity will be the next big thing in executive circles

Speakers:

Stewart Rogers director of marketing technology; VB Insight
Philip Sheldrake technology analyst and managing partner, Euler Partners
Adam Messano senior project manager; Advanced Auto Parts
Eric Lopez sales engineering manager; Workfront Inc.

This webinar is sponsored by Workfront.

VB's research team is studying mobile user acquisition... Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.

You can now add your birthday to your Twitter profile

Today social networking company Twitter said that users can now add their birthdays to their profiles.

Comedian Kevin Hart is doing it, as Twitter product manager Ricardo Castro pointed out in a blog post on the news today.

“Your birth date is a completely optional part of your profile and you have full control over who can see it,” Castro wrote.

This is just the latest change Twitter has made. The company has been on a tear in recent weeks to roll out changes more quickly. Last month Twitter started testing out product and place pages and announced plans to increase the character limit for direct messages on Twitter. Last week Twitter enriched its tools for targeting certain audiences for advertisers.

The product rush has come right as Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo announced that he was stepping down, with cofounder Jack Dorsey taking the reins while Twitter searches for a replacement.

VB’s research team is studying mobile user acquisition... Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.

Martes, Hulyo 7, 2015

Lunes, Hulyo 6, 2015

1) Who is looking at this page?

2) Is there related information that should be easily accessed from this page?

3) Is your content clearly labeled?

4) What are the key elements you want customers to see when visiting your site?

5) Is your contact information easily accessible?

6) What call to action is your page looking to incite?

Related posts:

More information:

More information:

What you’ll learn:

Speakers: