•Accept Credit Card Online Software Lets Anyone Accept Credit Cards
At one time (say, five to ten years ago) there were big barriers to entry when it came to accepting credit cards. There were stiff application fees, lengthy applications, and detailed credit history checks. In most countries, it's still like that. But in the US, competition for the exploding ecommerce market has eroded those restrictions. The shift from a hardware-based to a software-based credit card processing system has also helped democratize things. Now, virtually any adult in the US...
•Affordable Paintings: Art Prints Buying Guide
The fastest way to bring beauty and style to a room is to put up prints of beautiful paintings. Here's what you should consider:
Painting Prints Price Range:
Expect to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-$500 for an unframed print--anything less than $50 is likely a poster. You should expect to pay a similar amount to have the print framed--note that many prints are designed to be exhibited without frames.
Before art prints were sold online, the only way to get them was through...
•Art Prints For Home Decorating
With the new craze for interior decorating inspired by "home makeover" television programs, more and more people are tempted to hire a professional decorator, even if they can't afford one.
Simplicity: the Art of Home Decorating
If you're thinking about breaking the bank for the sake of a beautiful room, think again. You don't have to spend as much as an oil tycoon to have a home every bit as beautiful. Here's why:
A pair of human eyes can only take in so much, no matter how much is put...
•Beating Adware, the Sneakiest Software
Promoters of adware, software that shows advertising on a user's computer, use some cunning tricks to get you to install their software on your machine. Here's what to look out for.
Adware is, by definition, something reasonable people don't want on their computers. That's why malware can't just come out and ask people to install it. Often, the computer owner is completely unaware of it being installed. But not always.
When adware doesn't want to sneak in through an open window, it will...
•Bedroom Furniture Contemporary Choices: Beds
Buying bedroom furniture? Here are some ideas for choosing a bed for a contemporary bedroom.
Contemporary Bedroom Furniture: Planning a Bed
Don't let your bed be an afterthought. Your bed will be the most prominent object in your room, so it has to go with your bedroom's theme, color-wise, size-wise, and style-wise. A huge bed in a small room will likely look out of place, as would a four-post bed in a room with sleek modern furnishings.
Bed Sizes
The most popular bed sizes are king, queen,...
•Business Web Content Writing Success: Scan-Ability
Scan-ability is a measured, objective, scientifically proven criterion of successful written web content. While making content easier for users to scan rather than read word-for-word involves a number of factors, simply re-structuring web content into sections and lists can yield stunning improvements.
Proven Web Content Success Factor: Scan-ability
I've found that scan-able content written with web publication in mind seriously out-performs content that was written as though for print:
*...
•Buying Furniture Online Can Be Safer than Offline
Furniture sales have historically been a major area of consumer complaints. Luckily, there are a number of reasons why buying furniture online may be safer than offline.
No Fast-Talking Salesmen
Many complaints say the furniture salesperson made promises that were not kept. In reality, furniture salespeople don't always know what they're talking about. The actual fulfillment of furniture orders is often handled by a different department, or even a different company.
Not having salespeople...
•Credit Counseling Services Checklist
There are credit counseling agencies that rescue people from the deepest financial holes. There are also credit counseling agencies that just shovel in more dirt. How do you tell them apart? by Joel Walsh
Signs of a Reliable Credit Counseling Agency
__Better Business Bureau Membership The service's website should have a BBB logo and a link to their record on the Better Business Bureau website. Click through the link to check that there are no unresolved complaints against them. Many people...
•Discount Bedroom Furniture Set Buying Guide
You don't want to break the bank buying bedroom furniture. But you don't want to break the bed because you bought cheap. You don't have to sacrifice quality for affordability, or affordability for quality. But you do have to keep your eyes open and your expectations realistic. There are plenty of furniture manufacturers that will be more than happy to part a furniture fool from his money.
Why Bedroom Furniture Craftsmanship Is So Important
Why does bedroom furniture so often seem to give...
•Dog Agility Training
Without agility, the most muscular person in the world couldn't win a fight against a fifth-grader. But did you know that for a dog agility is possibly even more important?
With so many of a dog's happiest moments spent running, jumping, catching, and stretching, dog agility training can really help dogs age gracefully and happily.
What is dog agility training?
You’ve probably seen dog agility training on television. The dogs run a course of tire hoops, tunnels, seesaw, dog walk plank,...
•Dry Skin Care Quiz
Most people who think they know all about dry skin, chapped skin, chafing, redness and other signs of skin dehydration really don't. Take this quiz to make sure you know who your skin's enemies are.
The answers are located at the end of the quiz.
1. What is *not* one of the three most common skin types?
a.) Moist
b.) Normal
c.) Dry
d.) Oily
2. What is "combination skin"?
a.) Oily to dry
b.) Normal to dry
c.) Oily to moist
d.) Normal to moist
3. Which of the following is not one of...
•E-commerce Solution: Shopping Cart or Web Store?
If you’re planning on opening your own online store, you should make sure that you learn all about e-commerce, so that you can select the best online store builder for your business. One big decision you want to make early on is whether you want your online store to consist only of a shopping cart, or if you want your online store to be your entire site, with shopping cart functionalities available to every page. Let's look at the options.
Ecommerce Option One: Complete Online...
•Google's Good Writing Content Filter
The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't let the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, distract you from the importance of good content.
I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world's...
•Grow Your B2B Small Business without More Marketing
Want to grow your business-to-business small business without chasing after new clients? Expand with new value-added services that complement your existing offering. Find out how.
If you have a business-to-business small business, some of your clients inevitably will go out of business, get bought out, undergo management shake-ups, or just get seduced by a new vendor. You have to grow your business just to stay in business.
But how?
• Undertake costly and time-consuming marketing and...
•Home Skin Care Tips: Emily’s Smart Move
Thinking about home skin care but worried about looking like Tammy Faye? Read this real-world scenario of how one person found home care tips for skin online to become beautiful.
Ever wonder how some people manage to do all their skin care at home, without the expensive skin care products you've tried, and still look better than you do? No, they're not secretly using the most expensive product at the cosmetics counter. It’s not easy, but successful home skin care is certainly possible. Meet...
•Is now a good time to sell your home?
If you own a home in a real estate boom market, you are probably richer now than you ever thought you could be–on paper. Even if your house is in a real estate market that's rising more modestly, you may still be feeling pretty flush–on paper. But is it possible to "cash out" your paper wealth?
Assuming you're living in the home you own (if you own investment properties, stop reading this article now and just go talk with a real estate broker or investment advisor), you'll have to find new...
•IT Networks: How to Argue for a Bigger Budget
IT network managers have to fight the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mindset to win resources. With computer networks, that mindset is dangerously complacent. IT networks will keep pumping data until they die or let in hackers. Here are some winning arguments against "if it ain't broke…"
IT Network Maintenance: Better Analogies Don’t let your IT network's budget get lumped with IT in general--or worse, operations in general. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" sometimes makes sense in IT or...
•Merchant Credit Card Processing Services: Easy, Cheap and Necessary
Your online business needs to accept credit cards. That’s true whether your business is the next ebay or you’re just selling your old collectibles on ebay. You’re simply holding your business back if you don’t accept the payment method of choice of the internet. Sadly, many people think they won’t qualify for a new merchant account to accept credit cards, or that it will be too expensive or complicated. That might have been true a few years ago, but not anymore.
Why Anyone Can Accept Credit...
•Real Estate: Mark Twain's Case for Investing in the Bay Area & Other "Bubble" Markets
Mark Twain took a long-term and somewhat philosophical look not only at life but real estate. Looking through Mark Twain's eyes, there's a strong case for continuing to invest in tight real estate markets such as Bay Area real estate.
Real estate is always a good investment, Mark Twain once said, because "God isn't making it anymore!" With talk of a "bubble" in high-priced real estate markets such as the Bay Area, New York City, and Boston, it's important to remember that when it comes to the...
•San Francisco Real Estate: Buyer's Market? Seller's Market? Both?
San Francisco real estate, one of the USA's supposedly "frothiest" real estate markets, is no longer an instant jackpot for sellers–now it's just a jackpot. Buyers, though still facing high prices, now have enough time to actually think an offer over before making it.
Back in 2004 a piece of San Francisco real estate might spark a bidding war among prospective buyers as soon as it hit the market. Today, a property might actually–gasp!–sit on the market long enough for buyers and sellers to...
•SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded
The "duplicate content penalty" myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.
Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a "mirror" penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single...
•SEO for Traffic with Content vs. Ranking with Links
How do you grow your search engine traffic without adding a single new link or making any changes to your existing webpages?
It's simple. Just add content.
Simply having keyword-optimized pages of content on your site won't rank you high for competitive search engine keywords–that's a fact of life. But keyword-optimized content can really bring in the traffic for low-competition and unique keywords. The low-competition and unique keywords are typically longer multi-word variants of the...
•SEO Outbound Link Relevance
You know search engines evaluate a site based primarily on the links going to it (inbound links). The PageRank of the sites on which the inbound links are located, and the anchor text of the links, matter a lot. But if you're like most webmasters, you don't appreciate the value of outbound links.
Outbound Link Relevance & Anchor Text
The clearest way that outbound links can affect SEO is through their anchor text.
Outbound links' anchor text affects a page's search engine ranking in much...
•SEO Web Links: Directory Alternatives
If you were writing a textbook on SEO linking circa 2001, you almost certainly would have included a chapter on web directories. They used to be the primary way of actively acquiring one-way inbound links, before content syndication, blogs, or the paid link market really took off.
Web Directories and SEO Links: What Went Wrong?
Fast forward a few years, and you'd have to rewrite the chapter on directories and web links. In fact, you would probably downgrade web directories from a chapter...
•Skin Care Tips: Online Product Shopping Check List
There are so many good skin care products online, you'd be missing out if you didn't look into buying your products via the web. But, as with everything on the web, it's buyer beware: there's plenty of junk thrown in with the good stuff. Here's what to look for and what to look out for:
Skin Care Tips on Product Price.
Don't fall for the typical website trick of providing a low purchase price and then tacking on a substantial shipping and handling fee--or offering free shipping but then...
•Small Business Ecommerce Web Design
If your small business is venturing into ecommerce, you may be daunted by the technical wizardry you think is involved. But fear not: complete web store software packages will keep all the technical wizardry safely behind the screen, so you don't have to worry about it. All you have to do is choose a design, stock your store, and promote it. Here's how to do that.
Designing Your Online Store: Choosing a Template
When starting a brand-new online store for a small business, you're better off...
•Small Business Web Shopping Cart Software: 7 Reasons Hosted Is Better
Why should you pay for a remotely hosted shopping cart for your small business website, rather than just install a free OpenSource shopping cart on your site?
There are a lot of reasons:
1) Focus. Your business is selling stuff, not installing and managing a complicated script. You'll have enough issues running a business that you won't be able to outsource to someone else the way you can with a shopping cart script.
2) Price. Paid hosted shopping cart software's price is inconsequential:...
•Stealth Web Advertising Tactics of "Illegal" Sites
Advertising a website is never easy. But imagine how much harder it would be if advertising your website were illegal.
Gambling websites face just that challenge in reaching US and Canadian audiences. In both countries, the government has put media outlets on notice that accepting advertising from gambling websites is illegal. (Note: in the US, at least, the industry disputes this, and charges have never been filed by the US or Canadian federal governments.)
The sites have come up with...
•The $10,000 Credit Card Challenge
Thinking about conquering your mountain of debt but too scared even to give your debt much thought? Read this real-world scenario of how one person erased $10,000 of credit card debt within a few years.
Ever wonder how some people deep in credit card debt manage to come out on top financially? This is the hypothetical but realistic story of Emily, one person who dug herself out of $10,000 in credit card debt in just a few years.
Never a big spender, Emily was shocked when she noticed that...
•Used Auto Warranty Warning: Beware Dealer-Issued Extended Auto Warranty Coverage
Buying a used car? You need an extended auto warranty to protect you from expensive surprises down the road. But be careful when your dealer tries to sell you used auto extended warranty coverage. Usually, the dealer is simply reselling used auto warranties issued by a used auto warranty company, with a markup of up to $1000. You could just as easily have bought the extended warranty directly from the auto warranty company.
But overpaying for a third-party used car extended auto warranty is...
•Used Cars: "Certified" No Substitute for Extended Warranties
Thinking about a used car? Nervous about what's under the hood? Used car dealers are feeling your pain all the way to the bank. In an ironic twist, "pre-owned vehicle" dealers have found a way to profit from their bad reputation.
No, they're not just selling overpriced used car extended warranties anymore. They're charging a 10%-25% markup on used cars "certified" (by them) not to be pieces of junk. The accompanying "certified" used car warranties in fact usually carry much less...
•Using Art Prints With A Minimalist Home Decor
Most decorators traditionally recommend a minimalist décor for many spaces, particularly small spaces such as apartments and guest houses. Unfortunately, many people believe that this means that the walls should be kept completely bare for a minimalist décor to work. Aren't pictures too flashy for a minimalist décor?
Art Prints: Perfect Complement to a Minimalist Decor
In a word: no, pictures are not too flashy to use with a minimalist décor. In a few more words: art prints are not too...
•VOIP Small Business/Home Business Advantage
Small businesses, home-based businesses, and self-employed individuals have been turning to internet telephone service (also called broadband phone or VOIP) in droves. What is the attraction? As a self-employed, telecommuting, small-business-owning freelance writer, I can provide some insight.
I switched my business to internet phones early in 2005. Despite a few hiccups, I'm not going back to landlines. Internet phone service has too many advantages, which I'll describe for you. I also...
•Web Business: What's in a (Domain) Name? For Casino Sites, a Lot
You've seen them before and wondered what the heck they were thinking: small businesses with domain names like reallylonganduniquebusinessname.biz. Half-out-loud you say: what, was reallylonganduniquebusinessname.com taken? A new advertising technique of "illegal" casino websites helps prove that your snickering is absolutely justified.
Cheapskates and Johnny-dot-Com-Lately's
If you've consulted for small business websites as long as I have, you have probably encountered more than a few...
•Web Content Mass + Keyword Optimization + Links = SEO
How does web content really affect SEO? It's often said that the answer is simply that content does not affect SEO very much–it's all about more technical issues. Yet a website's content still plays an enormous and fairly direct role in search engine ranking.
Of course, the whole goal of the search engines' ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical...
•Wedding Planning on the Web
Planning a wedding? Whether you're a wedding planning pro or a do-it-yourself bride, I know one thing you don't: you aren't using the web enough.
The web has become the dominant way to shop for electronics, travel, cars, housing, even education. But you can just as easily use the web to find caterers, event halls, dressmakers, DJs, photographers, videographers--even a wedding planner if you decide to take a break from doing it all yourself.
Here's how the web helps you plan a wedding:
*...
•Writing A Business Website Sales/Marketing FAQ
Everyone on the web thinks they can write a FAQ. But then why are so many FAQs so lacking? How often have you read a FAQ and thought, "that didn't tell me anything I needed to know!"?
Two Worst FAQ Writing Faux Pas
* Many websites don't separate their FAQs for existing customers who need support from their FAQs for prospective customers who just want the information they need in order to decide whether and how to buy.
* Many websites that do provide a special pre-sales FAQ turn it into...
•Your Credit Card Payment Is Rising: Warning & Tips
Summary: Did you know your minimum credit card payment is rising? A new government program working to get Americans out of credit card debt is pushing credit card issuers to raise minimum monthly payments. Will you be able to make the higher monthly payment? Here are some tips for getting by.
If you're an American, your minimum monthly credit card payment may soon be doubling. If you're only paying the minimums now, you'll have to be careful to adjust your budgeting to pay more.
Who's...
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