jennyjenny's Blog

by Dave Dinkel

Are you interested in starting your own business soon? If so, have you developed a business plan for yourself? Business plans are tools that help a business owner organize their up and coming business ventures. Although business plans are typically used as a source of organization, they are also used to obtain financing or attract investors. If you are planning on starting a business, but you have yet to develop yourself a business plan, you may want to think about doing so.

As nice as business plans are, they can sometimes be difficult to make and they can even be time consuming. That is why a large number of individuals make the decision to use business plan templates. If you are looking for a relatively easy way to develop your next business plan, you may want to think about using the internet to find templates. Although you can create your own business plan, all on your own, there are a number of benefits to using the business plan templates that you can find online.

Perhaps, one of the greatest benefits to using business plan templates online is that many of them are free to use. Of course, you will also find individuals and companies who are selling business plan templates, but you should be able to find a collection of free business plan templates online. The decision as to whether or not you want to purchase these templates is yours to make. Before agreeing to buy a business plan template or settling on a free one, it may be a good idea to examine all of your options.

Another one of the many benefits to using online business plan templates is that you may familiarize yourself with something that you didn't already know. Depending on the type of business plan you are interested in creating, there is a good chance that you will need to have a number of things included, such as marketing strategies, financing strategies, and much more. If you have never made a business plan before, there is a good chance that you may forget to include something important in your business plan. Using a business plan template reduces the chances of that happening. That is why you are encouraged to use business plan templates, especially if this is your first time creating a business plan.

It is also important to remember that templates are not permanent. For example, if you like the business template that you selected, but you would like to alter it a little bit, you should be able to do so. This is another one of the many benefits to using online business plan templates; you can easily personalize your business plan to make it professional, but personal at the same time. Although you should be able to alter most business plan templates, it may be a good idea to make sure before proceeding any further.

If you are interested in finding an online business plan template or at least giving them a quick look, you can easily do so. Perhaps, the best way to find business templates online is by performing a standard internet search. Your internet search should be performed with the words "business plan templates." It might also be a good idea to include the type of business that you are starting in your search. You will find that there are some online business plan templates that are unique to specific industries. Although a unique template may be ideal, you should be able to accomplish the same goal with a standard one.

Regardless of whether or not you choose to use an online business plan template, you are urged to develop yourself a business plan. That plan is not just a piece of paper; it is a way to help make your dreams become a reality.

 Article Source : http://www.freearticles.co.za

by: Len Hutton

Blogs are now an extremely popular and important part of the internet. Millions of people blog every day. As blogs have evolved over the years, so has the commenting system. Now anyone can make comments on a particular blog posting. As blog commenting has grown more popular, so has spam commenting. In this newsletter, we’ll go over why comments are a great form of feedback for your blog, how they help the credibility of your content, what spam comments are and how to prevent them from happening.

Comments – A great form of feedback

When blogs first came around, they were simply online journals. No one could post comments on a blog posting. That all changed in 1998 with OpenDiary, a site which allowed people to comment on blog postings. Now every blog, whether it is remotely or self-hosted, includes this option to comment.

Commenting is great because it allows real people to tell you what they think about your form. It gives you feedback on what you are doing right and what you may need to improve. Comments can be encouraging to you and motivate you to post more quality blog messages. Or they can be constructive criticism to make you work harder to get better at writing content.

Whatever the style of comment is, it is still very useful to your blog. High numbers of comments have the ability to make a blog look credible because they show that the blog is being read by a lot of people. That’s something that every blog owner wants, and comments help to let them know just how many people enjoy their content.

Bad comments

Unfortunately, spammers have now started to use comments as a way to spam. How do you know what a spam comment is? Well, a spam comment is a comment that only advertises another site or product. If the comment seems bland/generic with a cheap link thrown in, then it’s definitely a spam comment.

Here is an example of a typical spam comment:

“Hey, this site is really cool. Check out my really cool site at spamsite.com.”

Of course not all spam comments will be this blatant, but you get the point.

Fortunately for bloggers, as spam comments have grown, so has the ways to prevent it. Here are a couple ways that you can prevent spam comments from even being posted on your blog.

#1: Close off commenting on older blog posts

There are options for you to stop comments from being posted on any particular blog post. Lots of times, spammers will post comments in weeks or months old posts. So take away this opportunity from them to keep it from happening. Most blog hosters now offer this as a standard option in the tool panel. If one of your posts has been up for a couple weeks, close it up.

#2: Take advantage of software offered to prevent comment spam

If you host your own blog using WordPress, you can use an option in that software to prevent spam. Even if you aren’t using WordPress, you can still use other Spam comment blocking software like Spam Karma, Akismet, and Bad Behavior. While these aren’t 100% effective, they have proven to be quite effective in preventing spam from happening.

#3: Take a look at your settings and see what can be tweaked to toughen your protection

Lots of blogs now have settings to help prevent spam. If you already have a spam blocker on in your blog and are still experiencing spam, take a closer look at the settings to see if there’s anything that can be tweaked to make your protection stronger. However, if you do this, you should closely monitor your posts to make sure legit comments aren’t being blocked out. If they are, you might have to lighten up a bit.

#4: Regularly read your blog comments

Be sure to keep an eye on your comments. Even the best software or setting can’t prevent everything, so you will have to occasionally manually remove comments on your own.

By applying the above principles, you can ensure that your blog is full of only good, quality comments, which will help your credibility tremendously.

Comments are a great form of communication between yourself and your readers. They help the credibility of your blog!
 

Article Source http://www.articlecity.com

by: Ray Geide

If your mouse is working sluggishly or not at all, don't go out and buy another cheap mouse. The cause is probably just a dirty mouse. A quick cleaning could fix the problem.

First, you need to identify which kind of mouse you have. If you turn your mouse over and part of a ball is showing, you have a ball mouse. If you see a lens, you have an optical or laser mouse. Each type of mouse requires a different type of cleaning.

The optical or laser mouse does not need to be cleaned near as often as the ball mouse, but it and the surface it runs on can still get dirty. If you do not clean the surface that the mouse moves on, it will soon turn black. So about once a month or so, wipe the surface off with a wet rag. The lens probably never will get dirty, but if it does, take a soft cloth, cotton swab, or q-tip wetted with window cleaner or alcohol and clean the lens.

The ball mouse may need cleaning quite often, so you should get well acquainted with the following cleaning procedure. The dirtier the ball mouse gets, the harder it is to get it to move the cursor on the screen smoothly. If you have to move the mouse across the mouse pad several times to get the cursor to move halfway across the screen, it needs to be cleaned.

The mouse does not need to be disconnected to clean it, but you should close all of the programs that are running, so that you don't accidentally click on something and mess it up. If you do decide to disconnect the mouse, be sure to turn off the computer first. The mouse cord should never be unplugged from the computer while it is running. Doing so could ruin your motherboard.

Turn the ball mouse over and find the cover that holds the ball in. Look for arrows on the cover to show which way it needs to be turned. Place two fingers on the cover and push in the direction of the arrows. Once the cover has been turned about an inch, cover it with your hand and turn the mouse back over to the upright position. The ball and cover should fall into your hand. If it doesn't, shake the mouse gently.

Wipe the ball off with a wet rag.

Now look in the ball well and find the three rollers. Start by cutting across the buildup on the rollers with your fingernail (a knife or steel dental pick may also be used gently), then turn the roller and remove the buildup as you go along. If you do this correctly, you will end up with one curled strip of buildup for each roller. Make sure to remove the buildup from the well. If it falls inside somewhere, blow and gently shake it until it comes out.

Take a wet rag and clean each of the rollers by wiping across it, then turning it and wiping again. Continue until the entire roller is cleaned. Put the ball back in the ball well and lock the cover back in place.

If the mouse still has problems once it is assembled, try cleaning it again. If that doesn't work, you may need to buy a new mouse.

It is a good idea to regularly clean the surface that the mouse is on because the cleaner the surface, the less dirt will get inside the mouse and the less often you will have to clean it.

If your mouse is shared by many people (especially if one of them is sick), you may want to disinfect the top of the mouse between users.

Follow these instructions and your mouse will be up and darting again in no time. 

Article Source : http://www.articlecity.com

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The latest offering from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares aired on Channel 4 last night, followed the somewhat disastrous adventures of ex-boxer Mike and his wife Caron Ciminera as they struggled to run the Fish & Anchor, a restaurant in Lampeter, West Wales. Whilst the couple's arguing appeared to better the food they were originally sending out (a mix of jarred sauces and home cook book trophy dishes) they did let slip on a fantastically poor bit of black hat optimisation, which I hope made all white hat SEOs laugh out loud.

If there was one lesson to take away from the show, it would be - Don't fake reviews!

In order to gauged the feeling of the local community for the failing restaurant come sports bar, Ramsay conducted a search on Google for the Fish & Anchor, to which he was presented with a range of reviews, two of which were rather suspiciously from a character calling himself Michael or Mike Burns.

On the Wales portal of the BBC website Burns had posted "Well i don't get excited about food too often, and having dined in Rick Stein's, and Gordon Ramsay's,I think i have found a better restaurant in West Wales". On the SugarVine website he also posted "what a fantastic restaurant for couples, and families. it seems to have everything, the food has to be the best i have eaten (home or abroad) this place will go far". Other online reviews echoed what has already been said, but with the dire state of the restaurant, its food, its reputation and its perception from both the local community and Ramsay itself, would it not be right to question who was telling the truth?

The restaurateur confessed to posting the reviews, his rational pointing to stimulating custom, however with any reactive strategy it requires a degree of foresight - and I am not sure he really thought through the wider ramification of posting these "inaccurate" reviews.

Firstly, a warning must be expressed. For example, if someone finds your restaurant or hotel via a positive (fake) review and they have a bad experience, there is a chance that they will post a true review to assist fellow users and generally have a rant. The initial seeding of this true review has the potential to lead to an onslaught of further reviews from other visitors who might not have otherwise posted. Don't forget the saying "people don't lead... they follow".

But how can you manage your reviews and ultimately what your customers are saying about you? Well first and foremost, address the problem(s)!

You wouldn't put a sticking plaster on a gun shot wound, so why think that a positive review about the quality of your food or the softest of your sheets is going to counteract the adversities of your customer service?

The customer is king, a point stressed by Ramsay, and one that should ring true for any business, after all, without them, where would we be?

By rectifying or at least making plans to manage any failings within your business, regardless of its size, will be the first step in managing your online reputation, but this is an area I will not going into comprehensive detail for this post. Instead, I will offer some simply pointers as to how to harness online reviews for good.

Sites like Trip Advisor, which boasts over 10,000,000 user generated reviews of various hotels, holidays and restaurants is gaining increasing weighting as an resource for honest and unbiased review and via its system of community recommendation it really has the power to drive custom, and in many instances, divert customer - the key factor being positive, and consistent reviews.

But if you do run a successful hotel or restaurant and wish to harness these social spaces, but wish to do so in a more ethical way than that demonstrated in Kitchen Nightmares than why not encourage your diners of hotel guests to post a review after their stay.

When the customer is paying their bill or even booking their hotel room why not take their email address, or even ask them to submit their business card in return for entry into a monthly prize draw for a free meal in the restaurant?

In addition to building up a client database by collecting this data - for use in promotional mailings including notifying customers of events, promotional and the launch of a new menu - you can also harness it to stimulate online reviews by dropping your customers a short email after their stay / meal, which might look something like the following example...

"Good afternoon Simon, and thank you very much for your booking at the Leapfrogg Restaurant, we hope you had an enjoyable meal.

We pride ourselves on the quality of our food and our attentive staff however we're always striving to enhance and improve what we do, and as such we would appreciate you taking two minutes of your time to write a review for us at Trip Advisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com), a free travel guide and research website that allows users to post review and ratings.

Your comments are important to us, and will be used to improve the Leapfrogg restaurant.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to welcoming you again to the Leapfrogg restaurant in the near future.

Sincerely,

A Restaurateur
Leapfrogg restaurant
Brighton
Tel: 01273 669 450"

Of course, many of your requests will be ignored, but providing you are personal in your emails (a point we at Leapfrogg have mentioned previously in this blog) then you are more likely to get a response, and even if you only have a 5% success rate, this is still 5% of valuable customer feedback.

A point to which I will conclude this article is one which has stuck with me from London's SMX, and one that I will most certainly be repeating from here on out is that "Yesterday's news no longer wraps today's fish and chips". Online news and online content, including user generated reviews do not simply get binned like a newspaper at the end of the day, but they remain live, and can even appear within the search results for a brand keyword search... so isn't it worth paying attention to what your customers are saying?

 Article Source : http://www.articlecity.com

Submitted By: Felix K

In the past, digital data storage was handled by humongous mainframes that could crowd half your living room. Fortunately, those times are finally over in this period of small-sized digital hard drives. Computer parts manufacturers have successfully reduced the size of data storage devices to more or less the size of a palm. This type of digital storage stands in the center of this Information Age as the haven for tech-advanced and ordinary people alike who are continuously hit with avalanches of digital information and data rushing. Moreover, this period of small-sized digital hard drives is where the maverick Western Digital comes in for all tech-savvy out there who want more storage capacity and reliability.

Earlier versions of digital hard drives could already store a cabinet full of information. While this may have been an immense accomplishment before, the current versions of digital hard drives surpass this capacity as they can store files of information as tall as a ten-story building. And, Western Digital hard drives prove to be responding to this challenge with flying colors.

HDs with More Storage Space yet Surprisingly Small-sized

Even as early as 2003, Western Digital has been expertly satisfying the market of tech people and gamers with its Raptor series internal hard drives. These internal hard drives were synonymous with high performance, speed and class. The first of its series, a 36GB internal hard drive, set off perfectly in the right course with an impressive 10K RPM spindle speed and 16MB buffer size. But Western Digital did not stop there. In the following year, they released the 74GB internal hard drive that gave users even more room for data storage.

Presently, internal Western Digital hard drives still have the same 16MB buffer size and 10K RPM spindle speed. The only difference is that they offer more storage capacity. Western Digital hard drives now have the storage capacity as large as 300GB! This storage size offers higher performance in terms of access time, sustained data transfer rates and IOPS. Moreover, Western Digital hard drives keep down their noise level and temperatures despite the doubled capacity and interface speed. And, as if these features are not enough, Western Digital has managed to keep the size of its hard drives as small as possible. To every computer savvy’s surprise, they look more like a notebook hard drive than the typical desktop drive.

Easy-Use Portable Hard Drives

Despite larger internal storage capacity, computer users can’t seem to get enough space for digital photos, videos, music and important files. Also, these computer users are in the look-out for a portable data storage device. Western Digital meets these needs by offering a line of portable external hard drives.

Installed in these hard drives is the My BookTM Essential EditionTM that helps manage a roomful of space for digital files, photos and music. Knowing that, downloaded files like an mp3 music album of one’s favorite artist can get as big as 1GB; this special feature is a blessing to Western Digital hard drives users.

External Western Digital hard drives are sleek and easy to use. These hard drives are pre-formatted so there are no hassles about technical setups. To use these hard drives, you only need to plug them into USB 2.0 ports and you are off to a one-of-kind digital storage experience. Moreover, once external hard drives are plugged in, they are integrated with the host computer that they automatically turn on and off along with it. With these features, describing external Western digital hard drives as user-friendly is simply unavoidable.

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