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The story of the sitting Buddha.
Can’t help to think about attainable goals and how it ties into the way we play of life. Thinking that life is playing you, is only another way of playing your persona in the theatre of life, with the hope to be better. (via Reniersky by Dōgen Zenji)
Ram Dass – Here and Now – Ep. 159 – Stuck In-Between Stories
In this dharma talk from 1993, Ram Dass looks at how each of us can get stuck in our transition between the fear-driven social institutions that we were born into and the love-driven paths of the heart that we are re-discovering for ourselves.
In-Between Stories
Ram Dass shares a revealing piece of wisdom that looks at how we find ourselves stuck in-between the stories of the past, served to us through culture, religion and politics, and what we are discovering to be true about the nature of things. He examines how religious institutions have established the myth that the only path to God is through their doors.
“You and I recognize the power of the human heart as a social institution.” – Ram Dass
Freedom From Fear (20:05)
Looking back at his time at Harvard, Ram Dass speaks to how the institution of science is slowly replacing religion in our society but instead leaves us disconnected from ourselves, each other and God. Ram Dass shares an honest reflection about the failures of the 1960’s social movement which sought to overturn the empty stories of the establishment. How do the tendrils of fear keep bringing us back into suffering, even when we are acting from a place of best intention?
“It is clear to us now, in terms of myths, we used to think that what we thought was the best way to play the game. That the thinking mind and then science, which is its child, and then technology, which is its child, would take and reorganize everything in such a way that we would be happy, free of suffering, joyful and peaceful – are you?” – Ram Dass
Standing Between Hope and Hopelessness (27:30)
Ram Dass speaks to the possibility of shifting to a love-driven social institution that is possible when approached with a still mind and open heart cultivated from spiritual practice.
“I am talking now to you about what myths you and I have to live with in order to be effective players in the game. What can we get from our inner work all these years now as we hear once again, what we hear in the 1960s, a kind of liquid possibility that the kind of dream that we have deep in our being that there can be social structures which are compassionate? There can be social structures which are just where there is real equity. Dreams that we can hear each other and celebrate ethnic diversity, instead of being threatened by it. Dreams that we can walk on earth and just hear each other.” – Ram Dass
Who Dares Wins
The basic parts needed to build your website
The basic parts needed to build your website
Build your website
Building your own website requires a collection of skills. You do not have to be a master in each of these. This post is the first one that will be making up a complete series. The aim of this post series is to give you a complete guide from beginning to end, on how to build your website. you can find the index to this series here
Timing: Writing this series will stretch over…
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Making sense of computer equipment requirements. include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/01_xyzlinks.php'); The purpose of the XYZ computer service is to make the difficult decision of what computer equipment to buy when starting your business easier.
A little bit of advertising skills goes a long way.
A little bit of advertising skills goes a long way.
[insert_php]include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/01_xyzlinks.php’);[/insert_php]
Some basic advertising skills will save you money and help to speed things up, during your new business start-up.
One of the many important tools in a entrepreneurs toolbox is marketing skills. You do not have to be a professional marketer but a few basic skills can go a long way. With the XYZ service you will acquire some…
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Moderators Tasks
Tasks to be performed – titles and descriptions
Working from the performance report and planing, the following tasks needs to be done by the moderators of the group. Please reply in the comments: Add your name and the number of the task you want to perform. The list will then be updated accordingly:
Daily trend report – Tracey
Post Translator – ?
Facebook page admin – ?
Jabulani project reporter…
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The trick is: Unconditional Positive Vibe
The trick is: Unconditional Positive Vibe
This is why you need to know about upv – unconditional positive vibe.
Shortly after you fell asleep, the cat destroys your cellphone charger cable, resulting in you oversleeping with a good 30 minutes. From the word go your day turns-out to get worse with each step of the way, on your way to work you run out of petrol and have a close encounter with road rage. When you eventually make it to…
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Do you have a social media work policy in place?
Do you have a social media work policy in place?
Many questions pop up with this, like: Do I even need to have a social media work policy in place? If, yes: Do you regulate your staff’s social accounts with the precision of Kim Jong-un? OR do you ask nice and hope for the best? Let’s explore some points.
In most cases small business owners will be convinced that, because they are located in a small town, no one uses it or it doesn’t matter.…
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Analytics – Know where you are heading.
Have you ever sat next to a highway, by the foot of a hill, and listen to the cars come past. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the engines “pull harder” as they start climbing the hill. Trucks labours more and the sound changes more than with cars, that comes with a weight advantage.
Why am I telling you about car engine noise? In the past 4 parts of this series we look at:
Proposition Strategy –The strategy behind a car with a story
Acquisition Strategy –How to make it possible for people to find you
Conversion Strategy – Converting visitors to customers
Retention Strategy – How do you make them come back?
Think of the combination of all these parts above, as parts of an engine. The highway hill we sitting next to will be the content we publish.
Analytics and Management Strategy
Analytics can be done in many ways and a plethora applications are available for free or to buy. I want to show you the different, and most likely the first ways to get analytics at no cost. No Cost as usual does not mean without work.
Why do you need analytics?
When we go back to our analogy above, you can see analytics strategy as the gauges in your car – Speedo, fuel level, temperature and more. Each of these gauges, in this car tells the driver very specific information. This info is vital to driving your car, and without it your chances of having a fatal accident grows.
You may not be aware of analytics, in your everyday life, but it’s everywhere – I find the cricket ones really interesting. My first taste of real performance analysis, apart from college came with one of my first jobs, in a highly production driven industrial environment. In some instances we tracked performance on certain pieces of equipment down to 15 minute intervals. These where usually done manually and as problem solving techniques. Many mechanical problems where pointed out by measuring the performance.
That is but one application. I believe the sample above will help you see the importance of analytics. Obviously you use/don’t use that is up to you, but keep in mind not having Key Performance Indicators that comes from analytical data, are very much the same as throwing a rock in the bush and see what jumps out.
Let’s stop driving in the dark. – Without lights.
The very first basic concept dwells around efficiency, or output/input x 100 = efficiency as a most basic example. In the mechanical world friction is one of the big culprits, and to date I do not know of any mechanical device that can give more, than you put in.
What we want to know in a business context, will be the engine noise from above – I will go ahead and show you a couple of ways that we can calculate how hard our engines are working, and point out a few reasons from social media and other platforms that may be the cause of the additional labour in your engine.
The obvious part here, is that the higher the efficiency, the more bang for your buck.
The components of an anlytical and management strategy.
The parts of your business and website, that makes up to be part of your analytics strategy, can reside in online applications and analysis of physical elements, it’s not only a computer thing. I believe that with google Analytics, you can by using custom matrices – even count how many times a day, your house front door opens and closes. You will have to add some Arduno.
The parts that makes up an analytics strategy are:
Web analytics
Competitor Benchmarking
Development of KPIs
Where to start
All of this is a bit like cooking, everyone has their own style. The methods explained next are not a set of rules, but more the result I ended up using most often because it suits my needs. You on the other hand will be able to grab enough from this article to enable you to apply these methods for your own purposes.
The examples to follow applies to web applications. I use real world analytics extensively in my hospitality point of sale software – Quickfood Here the results are often very clearly visible, because it points out causes of losses in efficiency, which most of the time result in theft and dismissal. With the first implementation of this, I both solved a problem and created a new one at the same time.
The employees honest enough to realize what is happening are the ones that made the most and worked the longest. On the contrary, those clever ones that still tried all the tricks, quickly started complaining about shortages and most often left before completing training. In fact, the training was a double-up to improve retention.
This just worked fine, the trainees that are looking for a job, because they know how to steal in that particular job, hardly ever made it to-day 2 of the training. On the flip-side, my turnovers increase to record heights and at the same time shortages literally vanished – I automatically offset a big chunk of the gains towards the employees.
So, yes analytics can be used to qualify things – mathematically.
The data
The more the better, start by grabbing everything everywhere, here’s some of the places you can find data:
Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
Your hosting package
Facebook Insights
Google Adwords
Other physical inputs
Webmaster Tools
Google started with this first, with Microsoft following closely – some years ago. Unfortunately, if you did not build and maintain your website – you will not be able to make use of most of these services. The webmaster tools by google were implemented as a way to submit your website to the Google Index, and it was a great improvement to the methods of others search engines.
One of the reasons I enjoy Google products so much is they start solid and only add truly useful features – Google webmaster tools evolved into a powerful tool. Not only telling you if your pages are indexed or not but at the same time supply exportable data with regards to problems, improvement suggestions and SERP (Search Engine Result Page) configuration, mobile compatibility and page speed. These are all very important, for the simple fact that your opposition also uses these tools to find problems and improve.
With many of Google product, you can easily integrate webmaster tools into Analytics, or Adsence. You do have the ability to combine many of the Google products as it suits your requirements.
This is an example of Pagespeed, at this stage the site shown are still in process of being built. Good results shows very little errors and scores above 90%.
Google Analytics
When looking a posts performing really good, you will often find that it took some time before the article started going well. This is most often because of optimization of the post, and you need analytics to find the problem.
The philosophy behind the thing is that you make up content – then put it public and measure the results. These results point out good and bad performers of all sorts of things. Then use this data to identify the problems, improve and repeat.
If you keep on doing this for long enough, you going to pick up on trends. You can then go further and automate reporting and actively track your performance indicators.
Getting it to work
You can very easily add a plug-in and link your site with an Analytics property. During the Analytics Set-up you will receive help and different methods to connect your site. The default set-up will give you lots of data to work with but the true value comes out when you start using custom inputs and configuring conversion tracking.
To explain how to use Analytics, is way to much to explain here, I will strongly advice buying a book or signing up or a Google course online.
The user flow are but one of many reports you can generate and export. Almost everything possible are configurable, and you can get answers to really important questions like: Which pages are losing the most readers and why? Google Analytics is a Super Powerful tool that gives precise, highly understandable visual presentations of all sorts of data.
Hosting package
Knowing what all the hosts world-wide offer is impossible, but all the companies I used since the start always provides analytical apps. A popular one is AWStats. These are quite nice to use for information about your hosting server and your site traffic.
Facebook Insights
Facebook pages gives you Insights, these are various chars with regards to your social efforts, bets part is that is clear enough to be used to get an overview of what’s going on now. To really work with the data, as in the others above – exporting the data and putting it in a spreadsheet makes life a bit easier. Or if you want to spend money, you can by software that does the calculations for you.
Key parts of Insights, that tells you more about your audience looks like this:
With Facebook page insights you can easily set-up Watch Pages as part of your Competitor Benchmarking.
Google Adwords
Google Adwords, is a powerful tool, especially when it comes to learning more about your keywords. But once again the true power starts to come to play when you integrate your Analytics Properties and start applying re-marketing.
Other physical inputs
There are many ways to implement data capturing in your business, it all depends what you want to get, the questions you plan on asking. A widely used method is Client loyalty points, here’s a sample of a simple card that works with your bar-code scanner.
The first level data you collect are with registration, you instantly build a database to use for customer relationships management. Birth days, addresses, email and all of those.
The second data level in this application gives you the ability to fairly accurately track activity in your shop in real-time. Nice you can remotely see whose their busy buying what.
The third level of data is once again analytical. By looking at sales data and identifying trends, you can better target specials, optimize operating hours ;and all sorts of exciting stuff.
By now you are wondering: how do you actually do the analysing part?
I’m not elaborating on this part too much, the purpose of this article is to show you the possibilities and options you have. Secondly I hope that by now it’s clear that analytics does not apply only to certain niches, and not to others – like business, or non–profit, but instead analytics is the marriage between anything quantifiable with some basic maths. You can apply this from growing flowers to measuring the time people take to read your post.
The take-away
Quantify and collect data, then put it together in a place where you can easily shuffle and sort. Once there you start asking questions, and the data should tell you all the answers:
Which posts get the most hits
Which posts gets the least hits
Why are no one going to page two
Which products are most popular
and so on – ask as many questions you can possibly come up with and single out the results and find trends and patterns.
Once you got all those questions answered you at least have an idea where to start fixing.
One last example: While looking at your posts, you spot the worst performing post, okay, so now you know this post is making your engine work hard, but can go better – Where do you start to fix the problem?
The first thing to do is look at how long the people are staying on the page, you can work it out like this: If your post is +- 1300 words, should on average take +- 10 minutes to read at 130 word per minute.
Here’s a tool: http://www.speechinminutes.com/
Now you can easily identify a problem on a page in an area, simply by taking the average time your visitors are reading the post for. So the answer is 4min30sec great, so starting from the top 530 words later: THAT’S YOUR PROBLEM!
Enough, in conclusion.
Getting this to work will take some practise and lot’s of testing and grinding, but it’s worth it.
Analytics – Know where you are heading. Analytics - Know where you are heading. Have you ever sat next to a highway, by the foot of a hill, and listen to the cars come past.
Retention Strategy- So how do you make them come back?
Retention Strategy- So how do you make them come back?
The fourth heading we looking at in this post series, deals with retention strategy. The motivation behind a good retention strategy, will provide your visitors with enough feasible reason to return to your site.
Getting the visitors, we dealt with in the last 3 posts, you can find them here:
Proposition Strategy –The strategy behind a car with a story.
Acquisition Strategy –How to make it…
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Blog to catch skimmers and scanners.
Blog to catch skimmers and scanners.
Communication is so important – and you want to do it as good as possible. One of the things you can do to improve the experience for your readers, will be to style your work to suit their needs.
Skimming or scanning are speed reading techniques. This two techniques are popular and constantly in use by internet readers. In this posts we are taking a look at the 2 reading methods and ways we can…
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To reach or not to reach - Why your facebook reach suck.
To reach or not to reach – Why your facebook reach suck.
There is many factors involved when trying to figure out why your Facebook reach suck.
The Facebook overly promotional filter are but one of the things to keep in the back of your head while using Facebook for business. In this post we take a look at various pointers that can affect your efforts negatively.
A while back Facebook made some updates to the way they show content, which they believe…
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Baby/Tod Swim starting 29 August
Facebook scams – and you are NOT part of it.
Facebook scams – and you are NOT part of it.
If you own a business and you pay a marketing person to post your stuff on Facebook, and you are within the Terms & Conditions of Facebook – you still lose.
Sad, but true. Facebook are developed by Facebook in such a way, that if you don’t pay them to run your adverts on their system, they do NOT have to show your posts to anyone!
Take note: if you are expecting to advertise on Facebook by not…
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Facebook scams - and you are part of it.
Facebook scams – and you are part of it.
If you own a business, and pay to have your content posted on Facebook, you are most likely supporting activity that directly breach the Facebook Terms and Conditions, which in some cases may be classed as criminal activity or fraud.
By feeding fraudster with cash, with the hopes to get more business, you are busy being dumb on many levels.
Fake likes and click farms are but few of the many ways…
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Conversion Strategy: the art of making a visit a sale.
Why waste energy on talking to people who does not want to hear what you have to say?
I see this happen all the time, surely there are situations that calls for the “in your face” approach, how and when you apply that kind of advertising strategy will determine your return. In this post we will be taking a look at alternative ways to grow your business, NOT ADVERTISING.
Once again, I want to…
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