The Future Of Apple Without Steve Jobs
October 31, 2011 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Business Development, Investing
The Rise Of Apple Stock Prices
What does the future of Apple look like without Steve Jobs? Analysts are predicting a very bright future.
Today, Apple is worth $377.83 billion dollars. Share prices are fluctuating between $401 – $409. It is the largest company in the world and new products are in development. The iTV, which is currently in the prototype stage, could revolutionize the television industry and it could add billions of dollars to the worth of Apple.
Gene Munster, analyst for Piper Jaffray, a $400 million dollar investment company, says “We believe that of the estimated 220 million flat panel TVs sold in 2012, 48% or 106 million units will be internet-connected, of which Apple could sell 1.4 million units,” Munster wrote. “We believe an Apple Television could add $2.5 billion or 2% to revenue in 2012, $4.0 billion or 3% in 2013 and $6.0 billion in 2014.”
Will that make investing in Apple now a good investment? David Zeiler writes an interesting article: Why Apple Stock Is Headed for $500 – And Beyond. The momentum behind Apple seems to be growing past the loss of it’s founder, Steve Jobs.
A recent book called “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson, clearly reveals the thinking that has been driving the success of the company for years. Steve’s out of the box, creative thinking has gotten the masses to use computers in a new way. From the launch of the MacIntosh in 1984, to the recent launch of the Ipad2, his products provided us with the next generation of technology.
Designing products with ease of use has been Steve Job’s philosophy. Thank goodness, because the masses are not tech geeks. His artistic sense of design, minimalistic lifestyle and obsessive attention to detail are the fuel behind the products we have come to love and use daily.
From his high school part-time job working at Hewlett-Packard, Steve Jobs found one mentor after the next to teach him about technology, product creating, business structure and relationships. Although not always the best at relationships, his demand for perfection and his drive for great product creation triumphed.
There is a future for Apple because of Steve Jobs. His vision and creative thinking will truly be missed, but his contributions to the world will benefit generation after generation.
Related Company Valuations – October 31, 2011
| Apple Inc. | 377.68B |
| Microsoft Corporation | 225.50B |
| IBM | 218.78B |
| Google Inc. | 193.01B |
| Oracle Corporation | 166.52B |
| Intel Corporation | 129.99B |
| Verizon Communications… | 105.09B |
| Amazon.com, Inc. | 97.32B |
| Hewlett-Packard Company | 53.35B |
| Dell Inc. | 29.15B |
1984 Launch of the Macintosh
Coolchecks.net, the best place to order checks.
Is There A Future For The Check Printing Business?
April 19, 2010 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Money Making Ideas
The check printing business has gone through hundreds of years of refining. In the 1600′s, England began using checks as a way to eliminate the problem of carrying sacks of money. Checks did not become a popular way of conducting money transactions until the early 1900′s. By 1913, checks were widely used in the United States and by 1915, W.R. Hotchkiss had created Deluxe Check Printers, a leader in the check printing business now called Deluxe Corporation.
Hundreds of Popular Check Designs
As personal checks became more and more popular, an overwhelming problem developed. The process by which the checks were sorted to the correct account number was painstakingly slow and expensive.
By 1952, there were approximately 8 billion checks a year that needed to be processed. On one day alone, there could be 69 million checks requiring sorting.
Dr. Kenneth R. Eldredge of the Stanford Research Institute to the American Banking Association, came up with a solution to the problem. His solution is well known today as MICR technology, which he patented in 1961. The patent number 3,000,000 was given to him. The patent office held this number for someone who would create a significant invention and they felt that this invention was significant.
MICR stands for magnetic ink character recognition. Dr. Eldredge used a special type of ink toner that had iron oxide in it. When the check was passed through a magnetic machine, the iron oxide particles became magnetized. These created patterns which were then recognizable by the magnetic reader. This allowed for matching checks to checking account numbers.
A special font was selected to use with this technology. That font can be seen in the bottom left hand corner of any bank check. The first font was called “E-13B.” The font has ten numbers and four symbols. This has been revised five times so the letter E was used to represent that. The 13 was used to represent .013-inch which was the design of the font. The B represents the second revision to the system.
By 1963, a standard had been set by the banking industry. The American National Standard Institute (ANSI) recognized the MICR technology and the chosen font as the one to be used on all printed checks.
Many revisions have been made over the years, but this original technology paved the way for the check business.
In the 1980′s the check business was predicted to be on the decline because of the use of electronic fund transfers. Thirty years later, the check business is still hanging in there.
Hundreds of Dog and Puppy Checks
Deluxe Corporation, recently acquired Custom Direct checks for $98 million. Deluxe reported sales of $1.34 billion dollars in the past 12 months. They are anticipating the new purchase of Custom Direct will increase their revenues by $60 million. They have successfully positioned their company as a leader in checks sold directly to consumers and not through financial institutions.
Although technology makes electronic funds cheaper than processing printed checks, the check printing business is still thriving in 2010. With fierce competition between VistaPrint, Walmart, Checks In The Mail, Carousel Checks and Harland Clark, it seems that Deluxe Corporation is currently the leader in this industry.
Basic Affiliate Marketing Tips
March 22, 2010 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Affiliate Programs, Money Making Ideas
Affiliate marketing? People look at you quizzically when you tell them that is what you do to make money. Most people have no idea of what affiliate marketing is. They just can’t wrap their minds around the idea even when you explain it to them.
Clickbank has paid affiliates over $1,503,759,460!
Most will ask how they would start affiliate marketing and how they would choose a product to promote? This is a common question that has an easy answer. Research your desired niche products and see what kind of demand is there. Use the Google keyword tool to choose a niche that has a lot of monthly searches – over 40,000 searches a month is good enough to get started. Make sure you have enough interest in providing your customers with as much helpful information as you can. If you have no interest, you can still promote the products, it just won’t be as fun.
Next, you will need to apply to become an affiliate through an affiliate marketing company. There are several major affiliate companies that are very highly recommended. One is Clickbank, which offers thousands of information products that people can download after purchase. Some of these products are software products that have a recurring charge and hence brings you a monthly payment without getting a new customer. Other products are solutions to various health problems. Some will teach you to learn a new skill. Some will actually tell you what the best selling products are.
A second company to check out is Google Affiliate Network. Google has combined their affiliate network payment schedule with their Adsense payments. So if you are already getting money from Adsense this is a good fit for you.
Google has thousands of merchants. When you log in to their site, they’ll give you statistics that are important to understand. There is a figure called EPC – and this means earnings per click. There is a 3 month EPC and a 7 day EPC. You’ll see that the higher the numbers, the better chances you have of selling their products. They list these statistics for each merchant. They also show you the merchant’s payout rank. So you’ll be able to see which merchants are paying the most to affiliates. Choose your merchants wisely with help from these statistics.
A third company to check out is Shareasale. They have hundreds of merchants with thousands of products. They will deposit your earnings directly to your checking account on the same day every month. Shareasale is run by Brian Littleton, who is experienced in every aspect of ecommerce. Shareasale has many merchants to choose from and they provide easy ways to make an web page that will display products on your site. They also have some video selling options available.
Affiliate marketing is challenging, but worth all the effort you put into it. You can be your own boss and set your own working hours. Be warned though, you’ll probably work twice as hard as you ever have worked. That’s what happens when you get to follow your passions. It hardly seems like work.
Launching a new website – Days 21-30
September 29, 2009 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Affiliate Programs, Internet
Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.
The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.
Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.
I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.
One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.
I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines. He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.
So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.
1. When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.
2. When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.
3. Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.
4. Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.
5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.
6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.
7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.
8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.
9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.
10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.
I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!
Ebay’s Largest Store Owner
September 27, 2009 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Ebay
Have you ever wondered who owns the biggest ebay store? The powerseller, Buy, has 867,112 successful transactions and is listed on eBay as the largest store there. Upon further research through the help of Google Maps, you can see that the address listed for this seller is in California and is located in the buy.com building.
The powerseller, Buy, is actually a leading e-commerce company that has been in business over 10 years and has over 11 million customers.
They carry millions of products in categories ranging from sporting goods, computer hardware and software, cellular, electronics, movies, music, books and more.
At their website, they even list their most searched for items: 16GB Flash Drive, 1tB external hard drive, 32gb flash drive, Cordless phone, Ipod touch, Micro SD Card, USB flash drive, cordless phones, external hard drive, iphone, iphone 3g,iphone 3gs, ipod classic, ipod nano, micro sd, microsd, netbook, netbooks, nintendo ds, ps3 refurbished, sansa sd card, sdhc, slingbox, webcam, wii, wireless router,zune, zune hd.
The www.buy.com website is ranked by Alexa.com, a web monitoring site, as number 238 in the United States. The lowest numbers indicate the most popular sites. There are some bad reviews about this site on Alexa, but eBay seems to have nothing but positive feedback for them. Apparently their customer service is outsourced to India which causes problems for United States customers.
Buy.com has been listed by Internet Retailer as one of the top 100 retailers on the internet. Apparently the top 100 retailers are responsible for 55.3% of retail web sales.
Amazon.com is the leading retailer on the net with $19.2 billion dollars in sales. Internet retail selling is here to stay. People are becoming more and more comfortable ordering online. How comfortable are you with online ordering?
10 Tips For Making Money on Craigslist
September 26, 2009 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Craigslist
By now you have probably heard of one of the nets’ most dominant classified ad websites; Craigslist. It makes no difference whether you are purchasing goods or selling goods, Craigslist is vital for any entrepreneur looking to make good money. First before you choose to surf the net and make money on Craigslist, you need to understand that there are a few critical guidelines to follow to help you become successful.
Why? If you don’t have the proper knowledge about Craigslist rules you might be blacklisted or banned. What am I going to share with you are the things you must know in order to learn how to make money on Craigslist and to use it in the right way.
Step 1 – Categories
You must advertise or sell items in the correct category. In case you don’t know, items posted on Craigslist are easily sorted by search engines and people surfing the net can view your listings when they are placed in the proper category.
Step 2 – Headlines
Create attractive headlines. This will be the main appeal of your ad and this will be the first thing that will attract the attention of your buyers. Write attention grabbing words and list a reasonable price for the items you are selling.
Step 3 – Use Photos
Post pictures. Listings that have pictures are easily getting noticed. Add as many pictures as possible to give the buyer a good understanding of what you have for sale. Pictures are worth 1000 words.
Step 4 – Respond Promptly
Don’t procrastinate your responses to inquiries. Respond to your inquiries as soon as possible. Remember that all inquiries are from potential buyers. Lastly be sure to follow up with your customers so that you can sell quickly.
Step 5 – Don’t Duplicate
Please don’t duplicate your ad. Craigslist can easily notice the same ad being posted multiple times and might consider it as a spam. You can be blacklisted permanently if you don’t stick with the guidelines.
Step 6 – Get Notified
Stay current with the new listing information you are interested in by using software such as AdNotifier.com. This program sends you automatic updates and messages every time a new ad is advertised in your category.
Step 7 – Resell Products
Purchase low cost items and resell them. This is so big since the resale industry is fast growing. If you have the skill for buying goods and reselling them at reasonable prices then Craigslist is a good match for your needs to start a business.
Step 8 – Use Links
You may create links in your ads. Like perhaps a link at eBay or your personal website easier to create access to your item. This will increase your chances for additional sales and possible upgrades.
Step 9 – Use HTML
Maximize the use of HTML in your ad to direct buyers to your link. This will help the buyer to get additional information about your products and services. Craigslist uses basic HTML which is not too difficult and can be learned at w3schools.com.
Step 10 – Use RSS Feeds
Use RSS feeds to stay current. When you find the search results that you are most interested in, scroll to the bottom of the page and in the right corner you will see the words RSS. Just click on that and you will get the link that you can bookmark to easily see what is current on that search. The nice thing about this is that you can see all of the ads in that category without opening up individual links.
Spend some time learning how Craigslist works. This means you’ll want to investigate what is selling in different parts of the world. Read other people’s ads and get some ideas of what you might want to do.
Of course nothing is easy at first. You need a lot of patience and hard work for your business you grow. I hope that these guidelines will help you with your money making endeavors.
Here are some good articles about Craigslist that you might enjoy.
- Interview with Craig Newmark, Founder Craigslist – Craig Newmark talks to us live at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in NYC about what’s up with Craigslist these days. Craig discusses why they started charging for rental ads in New York, how he fights spam listings and what his …
- Craigslist Vs eBay | I’ve Paid For This Twice Already… – I had a comment last week on one of my older posts about selling items on Craigslist asking me what I thought about Craigslist and …
- How to use Postlets to Improve Your Craigslist Posts – There are quite a few features that Postlets offers, some fee-based and some free. com does most of the work for you. However, in relation to my previous post, I’ll also show you how you can create the illusion of an embeded YouTube property video.
- Save Money on the Web – I’ve mentioned before that I’m a software engineer living in Silicon Valley. Such an occupation forces you to stay alert with all the technology advantages in.
- Wired.com: Our Craigslist – The cover story for the September 2009 issue of Wired takes a look at the current state of Craigslist and the challenges it faces as it continues to evolve. In a sidebar, the magazine’s amazing art director Scott Dadich invited several …
How to Make Money Online With Craigslist
September 23, 2009 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Craigslist
Craigslist is the best marketplace for buying and selling of products in your local community. It is a good marketplace to find hot jobs, real estate, books, electronic items or anything you need in your daily life. But it requires lots of skills to make money online with Craigslist, one of most visited classified website on Internet. Here is how one can make some good amount of money using Craigslist:
- Submit product or items that you want to see in the proper category. You will not get the benefit if you submit your items in the wrong category and even your entry will be rejected for submitting in the wrong category.
- Create an eye catching heading for your listing and if possible include an attractive price in your heading section.
- Include maximum pictures that you can add about the product you are listing on Craigslist. Listings with pictures perform better compared to only text listings on Craigslist.
- Also you can include your e-mail id your listing if you want buyers to contact you about the listing you have added.
- Follow-up immediately with the buyers who shows interest in your items. Buyers who show interest in your items are surely in the position to buy that item. So don't miss this money making opportunity whenever you get it.
- You should read Craigslist rules and regulations before start submitting your stuff here. Submit a well formatted and error free ad copy on Craigslist. Because if you do something wrong against their policies, you can get blacklisted. Never try to submit the same ad copy frequently.
- You can remain in touch with what other people are posting in your category with AdNotifier.
- Use HTML code to direct people to the link from where they can buy the product you have listed on Craigslist.
So if you are really aiming at making some good amount of money on Craigslist, never do the following:
- Never try submitting the same Ad copy over and over on Craigslist. This way you are just spamming Craigslist
- Don't post too frequently. If you must do multiple postings, keep a gap of some minutes in your postings.
- Don't submit your ad copy in the wrong category
- Don't submit an ad copy with grammatical and formatting errors
- Avoid including affiliate links in your ad copy
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Learning Personal Finance With Investment Clubs
September 19, 2009 by Sherry Tingley
Filed under Investing
If you are someone who would like to know more about investing, joining or starting an investment club can be a rewarding and educational experience. Many people feel more comfortable about learning about investing with other average folks when compared with talking to an expert.
Is it a good fit for you?
If you have been putting off learning about investing and setting any money aside, the discipline of a club could be ideal. Many people join a club to have a group that they can talk to about investing and apply what they learn to their own portfolios. If you have $20-$50 a month to set aside and invest through a club, you might find membership is for you.
Even experienced investors use a club to gain information about stocks that they do not have the time to research. Many hands make light work. All members benefit from the work of other members. Work? Yes you need to contribute more that cash. Don’t think that you can take a free ride. The pooled account may not be significant when compared to your 401(k) but everyone has a stake and needs to commit.
How Do These Things Start?
Groups of friends, neighbors or co-workers start talking about investing and find that a starting an investment club is the next step. Setting up a club takes some work but the National Association of Investors Corporation (NAIC) has all the information you need to get started.
How Do They Work
Successful investment clubs focus on learning as well as investing. Guest speakers, like a local broker or investment analyst, may be invited from time to time. Most people join a club to explore new ideas and discuss investing issues. In the early sessions of a club’s life, education might be very introductory, covering how to read a balance sheet, an earnings report and the club’s financials. Soon the club might be learning new ways to value stocks or discussing a book about Warren Buffett.
Clubs Are Work: Why Not Try a Money-Free Club?
Many clubs have fallen by the wayside when members realize that the time involved is significant. Often the treasurer feels this first. Because of this, groups that want to get started but are a bit intimidated at the paperwork, try a money-free club.
Some money-free clubs will focus on education only. Others will set up fantasy portfolios on a web site and buy and sell and do all the work, but with no real money in.
Advantages
No monthly contributions.? No need for a treasurer.? No accounts to keep and taxes to pay.? Great for people who are hesitant to commit to a regular club.
Disadvantages
People often lose their discipline if they’re not bound together by pooled money.? Often people take a money-free club less seriously. ? It’s less fun and exciting for some people, if there’s no real money involved.
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