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  • 17 Battle-Tested Resources for Marketers Who Stink at Design

    http://unbounce.com/design/17-resources-for-marketers-who-stink-at-design/

  • Use Drush to update multiple environments

    Keep development and production environments in sync with this drush setup:

    https://www.acquia.com/blog/use-drush-sync-your-drupal-installations-between-multiple-environments

  • Data API’s

    Here are a list of programming API’s that provide access to lots of data

     

    http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory

  • Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter

    • At what price would you consider the product to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? (Too expensive)
    • At what price would you consider the product to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good? (Too cheap)
    • At what price would you consider the product starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it? (Expensive/High Side)
    • At what price would you consider the product to be a bargain—a great buy for the money? (Cheap/Good Value)

    Wikipedia.org: Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter

  • 25 Entrepreneurs Tell What They Wished They’d Known before Founding Their First Startup

    There is some excellent advice from successful entrepreneurs about how to get started and then grow the company.  Many start-ups fail because they aren’t sure where their efforts should be focused.  These experienced businessmen have made all those mistakes and learned how they should have focused their most valuable resource – their time.

    These quick but hard-hitting tips show how to initially focus the work on the business, what pricing should be, and where your focus on your customers should be.  When a start-up company has a thousand things on the todo list, getting back to these basics can help focus on what’s really important.

     

    25 Entrepreneurs Tell What They Wished They’d Known before Founding Their First Startup

  • preg_match() matching quotes – How to escape quotes

    I was having the most difficult time getting preg_match() to match a double quote.

    $string = '<a href="https://www.calcmaster.net/" class="link">calcmaster.NET</a>';
    if ( preg_match('/src="(.+?)"/', $string, $matches) ) {
    $url = $matches[1];
    }

    This did not work for me.  I assumed that the source string may have had some unicode characters for the double quotes so I converted the string to ISO-8859-1 like this:

    $string = iconv("utf-8","ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT",$string);

    I still couldn’t get it to work.  In my string there was apparently another character between the src= and the double quote that I could not see.  The following code matches any characters that might be between the src= and the double quote if there are any:

    $string = '<a href="https://www.calcmaster.net/">calcmaster.NET</a>';
    if ( preg_match('/src=.*?"([^"]+)/', $string, $matches) ) {
    $url = $matches[1];
    }

    That code will match any character or no characters between the src= and the quote and then will match the url by only matching characters which are not a quote.  If preg_match() is not working to match quotes then try something like the above. Happy matching!

  • LinkSpawn: Automatically Deep Linking Large Websites

    Deep linking is a proven method for helping to raise a website’s rankings.  Larger websites in particular can benefit from deep linking since not every page can be linked from the home page.  LinkSpawn is one way that deep links can be managed automatically for large websites with very little effort.

    Links and Deep Linking

    No website will achieve high search engine rankings without links.  Search engines use links not only to determine a page’s relevancy but also to determine which pages will be indexed.  Search engines do not index every web page and pages that do not receive good links may be left out.

    Deep linking is linking to pages other than the home page of a website.  Any web page that has high quality unique content will attract links from other websites.  But it’s always a good idea to follow up new content with some active link building.  Deep linking helps the ranking of the pages that are linked which also helps the site’s relevancy in general.  Building deep links to highly relevant web pages solidifies a website’s position as king of its niche.  As a website is expanded, deep links also ensure that new pages receive just as much attention as established pages.

    With larger websites it can sometimes be difficult to organize a deep linking campaign beyond the first few levels.  With today’s high performance database driven websites tens of thousands of pages can be added in a short period of time and they all need links.  Manually organizing deep links to ensure that each page is well indexed can be a daunting task.

    LinkSpawn Automates Deep Linking

    LinkSpawn automates the work of distributing deep links across content networks to raise the visibility of each and every page.  LinkSpawn a website and it will create a custom RSS feed that provides links for all the pages of a website.  LinkSpawn automatically crawls the entire website and stores the URLs and page titles.  Each time the RSS feed is fetched, LinkSpawn will randomly select a different set of links for the feed.  Publish the given RSS feed to as many different websites and web pages as possible.  As Google picks up the links published through the RSS feeds it is more likely that the linked pages will be indexed and their relevancy will increase.

    LinkSpawn makes it possible to harness thousands of pages to automatically deep link to any website.  There is also an option for a custom link list to highlight only the most important pages or even multiple domains.  The custom link lists make it easy to update a set of most important links and feed that into hundreds or thousands of pages.

    Content is King But It’s an Orphan Without Links

    Google has always stated that its goal is to provide the search results to the highest quality content it can find.  The Penguin update proved that high quality content can rank with the best linked websites around.  But without good indexing from a deep linking strategy, some of that content may never see the SERPs.  LinkSpawn can help automatically feed deep links to a content network but whatever method is chosen, deep links are a necessity in today’s SEO strategy.

    This article may be re-published so long as it’s content is not modified and at least one link is provided to https://www.calcmaster.net/linkspawn/

    Get HTML Source Code for article

  • Get an Authorize.Net Account

    I’ve processed millions of dollars worth of credit cards and Authorize.Net is one of the simplest to set up and least expensive to use.  It’s totally secure and allows credit cards to be manually run or can be integrated into your website.  It can also automatically charge credit cards each month without having to re-enter the credit card number.

    Accepting credit cards ensures that you get paid on time.  The small fees for processing cards is easily made up by not having to hire an entire accounts receivable department.  Start accepting credit cards and you’ll get paid up front and on time.

    Go to Authorize.Net or directly to Apply Now

  • Your Linkbait Isn’t Working

    I could just as easily have called this “How to get free links in 5 minutes for an established site” but the concept is the same.  You’ve built a website, spent an inordinate amount of time writing quality unique content, but you want more incoming links.  All that linkbait isn’t sitting there doing nothing.  It’s probably attracting more attention than you think.  Here’s what to do.

    1. Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools
    2. Navigate to Health -> Crawl Errors  and click on “Not found.”
    3. These are all the pages that people have tried to link to you but mis-typed the link
    4. Create 301 redirects from the broken pages to good pages
    5. You’ve just fixed broken links and made them good links again.

    It’s incredible that people have taken the time to link to you but not taken the time to get the link right but it happens all the time.  Recovering these broken links can definitely help boost your SEO rankings and should be checked on a regular basis.

    A great way to distribute a large number of links across many pages is to use LinkSpawn.  LinkSpawn crawls entire websites and feeds links via a plugin or RSS to another blog or website.

  • Online OCR Document Processing

    We now provide an online OCR processing service which converts PDF documents or images to editable MS Word documents. The processor works by separating layout from text and attempts to lay out the document correctly. OCR processing takes time so our service allows you to upload the file now and then email the results when they are available. Try our online OCR service.