Author: rchapin

Marketing Activities with Leverage and a Force Multiplier

Posted on by rchapin

An efficient way to generate qualified leads without continual, heavy investment in capital is to focus on business development activities that provide leverage and a force multiplier.

Leverage means that the effort that you spend on a given activity continues to pay dividends long after you are finished working on it, and a Force Multiplier is something that allows you to get your message out to many people simultaneously without any additional incremental costs.
Three good examples are:

  • Developing and maintaining a website that provides a continually updated source of valuable information about your products and services.
  • Actively sending out an e-mail newsletter (sent ONLY to those who have opted in, of course).
  • Deploying a modest, yet appropriately targeted, phone book ad.   

Engaging in these sorts of activities allows you to create a system that will enable you to establish yourself as an expert in your field, attract new leads, and, done properly, pre-qualify them before they get in touch with you for more information.  All done while enabling you to focus time and effort to service your existing clients.

This isn’t something that happens overnight, and it takes time and effort to craft the content, continually update your site, and write regular, relevant newsletters.  However, the time is well spent because of its leveragable nature.  This is contrasted against activities like cold-calling, going to trade shows, and sending out expensive direct mail campaigns where the effort that you spend has no leverage.  Once you are done with the activity, it does not continue to provide you direct benefit.
 
On your site, there are many different ways of providing the content to your visitors.  Blogs, forums, articles, and newsletters to name just a few.  Each business is different and the mix of features depends on your business, your products and services, and your audience.

A good example of a site like this is Pineapple Alley Catering, a website that we designed, built, host, and provide a comprehensive content management system whereby it is easy for the owner to continually update the site.  The owner gets approximately 4 – 5 qualified leads a week sending him e-mail through the contact form on his site because of the depth and breadth of content on it, and the fact that it is regularly updated.

As far as the phone book ads go, it might sound like an outdated approach, but it is another of those leveragable marketing efforts in that once it is out there it continues to work for you without any additional effort.  In most cases, when someone cracks open the phone book looking for something, they are ready to buy.  Make it very obvious in your ad that more information can be found on your website and you can help use it to drive traffic to your site.

All of these activities have the force multiplier effect because it doesn’t take you any more time to have 1 or 1,000 people visit your website; send out an e-mail newsletter to 1, or 1,000 people; and literally millions of phone books include your business’s marketing material, phone number and website in them.

So, when thinking about ways to market your business think about activities that have both leverage and a force multiplier to them and you can begin to build a system that continually works for you and helps you get the most out of your marketing investment.

— Ryan Chapin
President, Nuts & Bolts Interactive, Inc

How to Fix Getting a Black Screen When Attempting to Install Windows XP

Posted on by rchapin

I recently was re-installing WinXP on my folks computer and instead of blowing away their existing disk used an extra one that I had lying around.

When I went to run the WinXP set up disk I chose to boot from the CD and then got the "Setup is inspecting your computer’s configuration" message.  And then just a black screen.  The CD drive spun down and then nothing.

Turns out that since I was trying to use a disk that was formatted as ext3 that the Setup program couldn’t continue.

I solved the problem by dropping the disk in an external enclosure and reformatted it as ntfs.  Once I did that it worked like a charm

Removing Extra Space In a Submit Button Under IE 6 and IE 7

Posted on by rchapin

When you create an input button that has a long string set as it’s value attribute IE 6 and IE 7 render additional, spurious whitespace or padding to the left and the right of the text in the button.  This is solved by adding the following conditional CSS style for the input button in question (assuming we have an input button with the class "submit_button"):

input.submit_button
        {
        padding: 0;
        margin: 0;
        width: auto;
        max-width: auto;
        overflow: visible
        }

AJAX and Accessibility

Posted on by rchapin

I’m working on a project that requires the use of some javascript for a simple survey.  The rub is that the pages all need to be accessible.  I’ve not yet done any work with any AJAX and accessibility but found a few links to articles to get me started.

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?
Accessibility of AJAX Applications
AJAX and Accessibility

Accessing A Subversion Repository Via an SSH Tunnel from Windows XP with Interactive Password Login

Posted on by rchapin

First off, I didn’t want to simply forward port 22 on my firewall to my local machine as I didn’t want to completely expose it to the net.  I have a number of hardened Internet servers that are completely exposed (for ssh connections, that is) and sufficiently locked down that I felt comfortable configuring my network to only allow ssh connections from a specific server.  What I did there was specify firewall rules to only allow connections on port 22 from a specific machine and then forward those connections to my machine behind the firewall.  I’ll leave the details of that as an exercise for the reader (or a future article).

Once that was set up, I could now set up an SSH tunnel on the trusted Internet server to my machine behind my firewall.  To do that, login to your server and enter the following command:

ssh -N -L234.234.234.234:8888:121.121.121.121:22 username@234.234.234.234

Where:

  • 234.234.234.234 ip address of the local machine
  • 8888 is the port on the local machine that is accepting the ssh connection that you are tunneling
  • 121.121.121.121 is the ip address of the firewall (destination ip for the other end of the tunnel)
  • username@234.234.234.234 is a valid user name on the local box that is accepting and forwarding the connection

Run the command, you will now be forwarding ssh connections on port 8888 on your Internet server to your local machines firewall.  I added that command to a shell script that I could run.  When I was through with it, just CTRL-C and it kills the tunnel.

Now the Subversion part on the Windows client:

I had initially set up Subversion to use password-less ssh keys but decided that I wanted to use the interactive password instead.  I had installed TortoiseSVN, so that included Tortoiseplink.  In this case, I simply added a tunnels entry into the conf as such:

customssh = Tortoiseplink -P 8888

With that entered, my tunnel set up, I could now connect with the following:

svn+customssh:/username@234.234.234.234/path/to/repository local_dir_for_files

This’ll enable you to access your repository from anywhere with your password.

I’ve got a Subversion repository on my machine at my office, and it became clear that it would be really nice if I could access it from anywhere on the net.  It was also clear that it needed to be with an interactive password, and not using ssh keys as I did not want leave ssh keys on untrusted machines.

Click on Read More for the full explanation of how I put it together. First off, I didn’t want to simply forward port 22 on my firewall to my local machine as I didn’t want to completely expose it to the net.  I have a number of hardened Internet servers that are completely exposed (for ssh connections, that is) and sufficiently locked down that I felt comfortable configuring my network to only allow ssh connections from a specific server.  What I did there was specify firewall rules to only allow connections on port 22 from a specific machine and then forward those connections to my machine behind the firewall.  I’ll leave the details of that as an exercise for the reader (or a future article).

Once that was set up, I could now set up an SSH tunnel on the trusted Internet server to my machine behind my firewall.  To do that, login to your server and enter the following command:

ssh -N -L234.234.234.234:8888:121.121.121.121:22 username@234.234.234.234

Where:

  • 234.234.234.234 ip address of the local machine
  • 8888 is the port on the local machine that is accepting the ssh connection that you are tunneling
  • 121.121.121.121 is the ip address of the firewall (destination ip for the other end of the tunnel)
  • username@234.234.234.234 is a valid user name on the local box that is accepting and forwarding the connection

Run the command, you will now be forwarding ssh connections on port 8888 on your Internet server to your local machines firewall.  I added that command to a shell script that I could run.  When I was through with it, just CTRL-C and it kills the tunnel.

Now the Subversion part on the Windows client:

I had initially set up Subversion to use password-less ssh keys but decided that I wanted to use the interactive password instead.  I had installed TortoiseSVN, so that included Tortoiseplink.  In this case, I simply added a tunnels entry into the conf as such:

customssh = Tortoiseplink -P 8888

With that entered, my tunnel set up, I could now connect with the following:

svn+customssh:/username@234.234.234.234/path/to/repository local_dir_for_files

This’ll enable you to access your repository from anywhere with your password.

Goal Oriented Design and Its Impact on Your Site’s Effectiveness

Posted on by rchapin

Take a 5 second look at your website, and then close your eyes.

What were the top three things that you noticed? If those top three things are not related to the top three things directly related to helping your business turn visitors into customers, your site isn’t implementing Goal Oriented Design principals.

Goal Oriented Design is a layout philosophy that prominently features the information and/or activities on your site that are most relevant to bringing in new business. Every business has a different sales cycle, customer profile, and website activities that help bring in new customers. For example, one business might have a high conversion rate for those who sign up for an e-newsletter, another might have good success with offering a free survey or trial download. The point is, that each and every business has a specific set of activities or information, that it can provide on its website that helps it bring in new business. These set of activities, or Goals, are what should be featured prominently on the site.

So, when you are looking to develop a new website or redesign an existing one, the following steps will help you develop a design and layout that helps you meet your business goals:

  1. Examine your sales cycle. What are the activities and/or information that prospects typically need before they decide to buy?
    1. Are there a series of FAQs or specific questions that most prospects ask?
    2. Do you tend to convert people who read your newsletter?
    3. Do prospects need to compare your product or service to one of your competitors?
  2. Distill this list down to three to five distinct activities or key pieces of information. These will be your Goals and you will want to create design elements that feature these items prominently in your layout.
  3. Create a design/layout that make each of those items prominent on every page on your website. Adding these elements to just the homepage on your site will minimize the effect. In most cases many people enter your site through a page other than the home page. Moreover, you never know when they will decide to click on the item that you are trying to feature and don’t want them to have to find their way back to the home page to do it.

For example: look at http://www.personalstockstreamer.com. The two prominent buttons on the home page, and at the top of every sub page on the site, correlate to the two most important parts of this business’s sales cycle: offering a free download so that prospects can try out the product, and making it easy for prospects to read about the feature set offered in the software. When you first look at the site, these items “jump out at you” and are easy to find.

So, take a 5 second look at your website and then close your eyes.

What are the top three things you remember? Are those things that your prospects are interested in, or will give them the information that they need to move them along the path of your sales cycle? If not, your site might not be doing everything that it could to help you bring in new business.

With a little bit of business introspection and some modifications to your site you can go a long way to help increasing your site’s effectiveness.

— Ryan Chapin
President, Nuts & Bolts Interactive, Inc.

Chaging the Default Browser under Windows XP for IE and Firefox

Posted on by rchapin

There are times when you might want to change your default browser; especially if you are a developer and want to make sure that something works as it should with both IE and Firefox.

To change your default browser:

  • Go to: Start/Control Panels/Add or Remove Programs
  • Click on "Set Program Access and Defaults", the last button in the left-hand nav
  • Click on the "Custom" set of options
  • You will see an expanded list of items, Web Browser, E-mail Program, etc.
  • Under the "Choose a default Web browser", select the radio button next to browser you would like to set as default.
  • Click "OK"

getURL() in a Projector Firefox Bug and Solution

Posted on by rchapin

If you have ever tried to do a simple getURL() command in Flash from an .exe projector you’ll notice that it fails when Firefox is your default browser.

Following is the solution to the problem in both AS 2.0 and AS 3.0

Here’s the code for the fix in AS 2.0:

// code on a keyframe on the main timeline

var swfUrl:String = _root._url;
var lastSlashIndex:Number = swfUrl.lastIndexOf("/");
var pipeIndex:Number = swfUrl.indexOf("|");
var baseUrl:String;
if (pipeIndex >= 0)
{
    baseUrl = swfUrl.substring(0, pipeIndex);
    baseUrl += ":";
}
else
{
    baseUrl = "";
}
baseUrl += swfUrl.substring(pipeIndex + 1, lastSlashIndex + 1);

myButton.onRelease = function()
{
    var targetUrl:String = baseUrl + "test.html";
    getURL(targetUrl, "_blank");
};

Here’s the code for the fix in AS 3.0:

// code on a keyframe on the main timeline

import flash.events.MouseEvent;
import flash.net.*;

output_txt.text = this.loaderInfo.url;

var swfUrl:String = this.root.loaderInfo.url;
var lastSlashIndex:Number = swfUrl.lastIndexOf("/");
var pipeIndex:Number = swfUrl.indexOf("|");
var baseUrl:String;
if (pipeIndex >= 0)
{
    baseUrl = swfUrl.substring(0, pipeIndex);
    baseUrl += ":";
}
else
{
    baseUrl = "";
}
baseUrl += swfUrl.substring(pipeIndex + 1, lastSlashIndex + 1);

function gotoTestHtml(event:MouseEvent):void
{
    var targetUrl:URLRequest = new URLRequest(baseUrl + "test.html");
    navigateToURL(targetUrl, "_blank");
}

myButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoTestHtml);

Here is a link to the original article where I found this with the full explanation and fix.

© 2005 Ryan Chapin