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In June of 1963, the fourth of twenty-four NAVSTAR satellites was launched into space, completing the Department of Defense’s Global Positioning System. Though there had been other types of navigational systems before, this was something completely different. The accuracy of GPS is astounding. Although designed for military use and operated by the U.S. Air Force, civilians could and did tap into this technology, and now GPS devices are widely employed tools to help people find their way and track objects.

Atomic clocks, exact to the billionth of a second, made GPS tracking possible. GPS works through receivers which determine location through geometry and trigonometry, figuring the difference in the arrival time of signals from four or more of the satellites. Location may be pinpointed within a very small area, and with some devices, even less. Currently, GPS devices can be cellular based, wireless, or satellite.

Businesses quickly picked up on the advantages of using GPS devices. With the ability to determine location, time, direction, and speed of any truck, trailer, or piece of equipment, GPS is invaluable for monitoring. GPS tracking is a wonderful tool for lowering a company’s operating costs. Rental car companies can easily locate missing vehicles. The unauthorized use of company cars can be traced. Trucking companies can use reports generated by GPS to keep track of their drivers’ productivity.

Drivers who are monitored are not prone to speed, drive a vehicle out of a predefined area, make unauthorized stops, or build up unnecessary overtime hours. The efficiency of individual drivers can be evaluated using GPS reports, and incentives can be used to up productivity. The increased efficiency means more stops can be made in a day and that translates into happier customers!

More and more businesses are seeing the value of GPS tracking. Saving money, time, and fuel, tracking devices lower operating costs measurably. In addition, the ability to locate lost, stolen, or missing property can save high replacement costs. The benefits are so valuable that many insurance companies lower premiums for customers who employ GPS devices.

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Filed under: Business

A tanning salon may be just what you need to get that color you want. It can also help you to clear your mind and to have some time to yourself. You always want your tanning experiences to be the best quality so that you can get value for your money. Here are some tips to help you find the right tanning salon for you.

The price is definitely a huge factor when it comes to choosing the right tanning salon. It has to reasonably fit into your budget in order for it to be something you continue with. As prices on necessities increase the amount left over for luxuries is squeezed smaller and smaller.

By taking the time to compare prices you can find out where the best deals are. Some tanning salons will offer a significant discount if you pay for it three or six months at a time. This can be a great way to save money, but first you need to determine if you really want to go there for that length of time. Doing your homework first will help make sure you don’t regret a decision later on.

The location of the tanning salon is something you want to consider. You may think driving 20 minutes each way isn’t a big deal. Yet when you start to do it each day, that is plenty of time as well as gasoline wasted on the trip. See if it is possible to get the same quality results at a tanning salon closer to you. There may be one by your office or where you pick up your children to look at.

You need them to offer some great hours too. Not everyone works from 9 to 5 and not everyone wants to tan after work. People always have other commitments so you need a tanning schedule that is flexible. If you can go before work two days a week and at lunch two days a week then make sure that tanning salon can accommodate you.

Spend some time getting to know how the facility operates. You can call with your questions but should also visit the salon in person before you sign up for services. Take a look around at the set up and determine if you will be happy there. If you feel uneasy around the staff then you aren’t going to want to pop in several times a week to tan.

You can get some good referrals too by asking around. There are many people who frequent tanning salons. So your co-workers and other contacts should be able to give you some places to check out. Many offer discounts for first time customers as well. That is a great way to save yourself some money. Make sure you research the type of tanning equipment you are looking for though so that you can find those locations that offer it.

Not all tanning salons are the same. Therefore you owe it to yourself to find the one that is right for you. This means you will be more likely to keep your scheduled appointments and to look forward to each of your tanning sessions. With so much competition out there you really don’t need to settle for anything less than what you are looking for.

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Filed under: Marketing

You know you need to stay in touch with the people on your list, but you’re in two minds about starting a newsletter. Will it take up too much of your time? What if you run out of things to say? Can you maintain quality over a period of time? How long should your newsletter be?

Your first aim should be to offer useful or interesting information. (If you don’t do that, you won’t have subscribers for long!) Your second aim should be to keep your newsletter short. Remember that people are inundated with email these days – they actually prefer something they can skim quickly and then put to use.

Spend some time thinking about the best format. You need a model that will be easy to reproduce week after week, month after month. Any one of the following five ideas will make your job easier. Choose one and keep it as a regular format, or combine several of them (for example, you could use the “Tip of the Week” format for weeks 1-3 each month, and offer a checklist every fourth newsletter).

—————– 1. Tip of the Week —————– This one speaks for itself. You can easily brainstorm enough content for six months of weekly newsletters (you need to come up with 24 tips, which you will present weekly). Anyone with a degree of expertise on a given topic should be able to do this without any trouble. A handy way to organize this is to (a) explain the problem then (b) offer the tip which will solve it. Length? Anything from 150 – 500 words.

———– 2. Top Ten ———– This is a tried and true format, and easy to create. Example: if you are an expert on finance, you could offer advice on the Top Ten Ideas for Getting Out of Debt, or the Top Ten Ways to Save Money on Car Expenses, or the Top Ten Tips to Pay Off Your Mortgage in Ten Years. Make sure you keep a tight rein on word length – just offer a couple of sentences for each tip, not half a page.

—————– 3. Three Ways to… —————– Sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge to come up with ten ways to do things, whereas just three ideas is a cinch. You can also explore three ideas in more detail. Alternatively, you can alternate the “Top Ten” format with “Three Ways to…” the two of them will work together nicely.

—————– 4. Before and After —————– Who doesn’t like makeovers? This works in a similar way to ‘Tip of the Week’ in that you show the problem and then provide a solution, but the ‘before and after’ approach lends itself better to case studies. This is a good way to interact with your clients – invite them to send in details of whatever needs a makeover: an article, a website page, their wardrobe etc, then present your solutions. Alternatively, you can ask for ‘before and after’ examples from readers who have managed to do this themselves, then showcase it for the rest of your customers. (If you don’t use HTML for your newsletters, you can add a link to a website page for the accompanying photos.) This works particularly well if you have a health and fitness related newsletter – your readers will be motivated by seeing the changes others have made through diet, exercise and weight training.

———— 5. Checklists ———— When you’re learning to do something new, there’s nothing like a checklist to make sure you don’t leave out a crucial step. Checklists can save a lot of time, and your readers will be delighted to get one. Write a brief introductory paragraph, present the checklist, and then follow it with a few final tips. You can either base your entire newsletter on the checklist format, or present one at regular intervals as a change from the standard article format.

Final tip: set up an address at yahoo or gmail just for newsletters. Spend a few hours checking out sites related to your own interests, and sign up for any free newsletters. Every so often, check your new email account and browse, looking specifically to see what approach other editors use for layout and articles. When you see a format you like, print it out and put it in an ‘ideas’ folder. Unsubscribe from any that are constantly filled with junk or endless sales pitches.

Our services at leaders excel include any where from a personal website to an elite Premium business package website. Our premium package features include creating a personal header with your company’s logo that communicates your product and/or services. Check out Leaders Excel Solutions at www.leadersexcelsolutions today for all of your website needs.

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Filed under: Internet Business

When you finally make the decision to become an online marketer, you’re going to be bombarded with all sorts of terminology regarding different types of marketing. One of the most lucrative of those terms is Niche Affiliate Marketing.

Niche affiliate marketing is the greatest way to get started online and one of the quickest and easiest things you can do. Let me show you why.

You may already know what affiliate marketing is, but if not, just type that term into any search engine and you’ll find many answers. Affiliate marketing is just marketing somebody else’s products and profiting from each sale. Many affiliate programs will also pay a fee for each click to their website from your link or banner.

Niche affiliate marketing is affiliate marketing while targeting a specific niche or target market. In other words, you might be interested in sports, but that’s a really broad niche. You would be better to consider a niche market a bit more specific like golf, or tennis.

When choosing a market, you need to make sure it isn’t too small or too big . If you get into a very small niche, you might find there isn’t much to market. For example, if your niche were golf clubs, rather than golf in general, you might be limiting your topics and product choices.

You might be better off to choose a larger niche. That way you can sell information about golf resorts, golf tees, golf clubs, and even target specific golf products, like Tiger Woods products. By the way, golf is a very popular niche to be in but it’s also very competitive.

Way back in the 1990’s, when the Internet was new and everyone was learning to market online, each of us created everything from scratch. We figured out what the most lucrative keywords were, how to market with them and then designed and built a website, created graphics, and brought traffic to our sites. And, traffic is a whole major niche of its own and I don’t mean the freeway kind!

Things have changed a lot over the last few years since I started online. Today, you can buy packages for niche affiliate marketing that contain prewritten niche websites with all the graphics included. All you have to do is load them up to a web host and drive the traffic to them.

Some of these packages contain prewritten articles and bonus packages to entice your prospects into signing up for a list and purchasing your products. A word of caution though, be careful when choosing these packages.

The amazing thing to me is that you really don’t have to pay a lot for these niche affiliate marketing packages and some of them even include training to teach you how to promote them. Well, think about it — the marketer who created the package stands to grow from your efforts when you promote the package, so the training is in his or her best interest.

I highly recommend that when you’re starting out, it will benefit you a great deal to find a package that includes training. Some have very high price tags on them, but those prices don’t really ensure that you’re getting a quality product.

There’s a lot more competition today than there used to be and that has driven the pricing down while still retaining a lot of quality.

So, find a really good product that includes a website you can put up quickly and good training to show you how to drive traffic to the site. Then, if you like, you can build a small niche affiliate marketing empire around it.

Just do it once and repeat over and over. And, over time, your profits will get bigger and bigger. You get the picture!

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Filed under: Internet Marketing

A dedicated server is a powerful server that is just for your website or business and no one else. This means that your server is not shared with others like shared hosting is. It is ideal for those who need reliability, high performance, better security, and the websites that are being operated are at an enterprise-level. In other words, a dedicated server is for those who need a lot of power and have the money to spend.

There are several advantages to operating a dedicated server. These advantages are:

The website performs better You don’t have to purchase equipment If other websites that share the same server have problems, your website is unaffected because you are not sharing.

The server is also owned by the web host, so you are more or less renting it from them. You do have the ability to customize your server based on whatever your needs are, but what it comes down to is the fact that the host owns it. This can be a good thing, though, especially if your business does not have the administration capabilities to take care of various tasks that you need performed.

Experience

Some companies may have the experience and others may not. If a business has the experience in-house, then that individual or individuals can take care of any changes that need to be made to the website. Some go to college to be able to do this and have no problem at all managing the server. Depending on the type of changes that must be implemented depends on what type of experience and individual should have.

Then again, there are some who just know how to manage servers without any schooling in the area and can do it. It is important to gage what type of tasks must be performed on the website, especially if it is a high performance website that requires a lot of maintenance and manipulations.

On the other hand, there may be no experience required at all. This is where you can choose managed web hosting through your provider. This is where they can maintain and monitor your operating system, dedicated servers, and applications. This way you can still have everything that you need without the experience to go along with it. Unmanaged dedicated hosting may be a cheaper solution for some businesses, but if the experience and knowledge is not there, then managed dedicated hosting is the way to go.

Is it the right decision?

Whether or not your business has the experience to manage a dedicated server, it is important to make sure the business needs it. If you are prepared to take on the cost that is associated with using the host’s equipment and you know that they can provide you with the necessary technical support, then it may be the right decision. It is just important to make sure that your website or potential website is large and powerful enough to require such a server. However, many business websites are and using a dedicated server allows them to make their website even more powerful. If that is you, then dedicated hosting could be the right decision whether you have the right experience or not. Don’t let the lack of experience deter you because there are solutions to that problem.

In the day and age where the website defines the company, choosing a dedicated server and using unmanaged or managed hosting can be a large decision. If you don’t know where to start, simply ask the various companies offering dedicated hosting and see who is more willing to help you understand. That can be a good indicator that you may be starting a nice business relationship.

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Filed under: Computers & Technology