Making Money with Articles: Becoming an Affiliate

If you can either write articles or have the promotion and marketing knowledge to publicize articles that others write, becoming an affiliate for several companies may be a great way for you to generate a good income right from your own home. You can do this by receiving part of the revenue off of sales that the company gets from people who “click through” from your website via the company’s links that are placed on your pages. Since you will be promoting a product or service, you will need a killer sales pitch and website content to get your readers interested in the product, convince them that they cannot live without the product, and to keep them coming back to your website time and time again for more recommendations and your useful content, which will get them clicking on your links once again. Although many affiliate companies only give you money off of the first sale you make from each customer, you have the option of promoting a good range of companies so that you can still make a profit off of your returning customers. If you cannot write this kind of content of your own, there are many ways to pick up free or paid content to place on your affiliate website. There are many reasons why paying for such articles would be to your advantage. First, you will be able to tell the writer exactly what you want, what product you are trying to sell, and what direction they can go in to keep your readers interested and informed. On the other hand, when you search for free content, you are limited to what is already out there. Secondly, you will own the copyright to this content. That means that no one else can reuse it without your consent. If you opt for free content, you will be sharing that content with an unknown amount of other affiliate websites, plus the original author will be able to place their byline at the bottom of the article which could result in them stealing your traffic. There are many products that have nice affiliate commission rates for those who know how to pre-sale their product and deliver click through customers who are ready to buy. As long as you choose to promote a product or service that can be very useful to a wide variety of people, then pre-selling your chosen company may not be that hard at all. The key in this situation may likely be getting those customers to your website so that they have a chance to see your recommendations and click on your affiliate links. Word Count 446 PPPPP

Going in Reverse Can Be the Right Direction

Returns management can offer significant cost savings for manufacturers. By David Blanchard For consumer goods and high-tech manufacturers, as well as their retail customers, Christmas isn't necessarily the most important time of the year. In fact, it's Christmas returns season that is make-or-break for many of these companies, says Curtis Greve, principal of Greve Davis, a company specializing in reverse logistics and aftermarket services. "Your ability to process the tidal wave of returns during the first quarter of the year will have a big impact on your company's bottom line," he says. There are at least 100 billion reasons for companies to take product returns seriously, since that's how much it costs U.S. manufacturers and retailers every year in lost sales, transportation, handling, processing and disposing of goods. Since 2007, the cost of returned consumer electronics has skyrocketed by 21%, reaching $17 billion last year. In a recent survey conducted by Accenture, 43% of the electronics manufacturers polled say that product return rates have increased since 2007, and only 12% say returns are trending downward. One might think this high rate of returns is indicative of customer dissatisfaction, with the problem being largely one of defective or substandard products. Not so, says Mitch Cline, managing director of Accenture's electronics and high-tech group. Only 5% of all returns are due to product defects. While another 27% are because of "buyer's remorse," by far the main reason why products are returned can be summed up in the phrase "no fault found," with 68% testing out fine after being returned. As Tony Sciarrotta, director of asset recovery at Philips Consumer Lifestyle, a manufacturer of TVs and other appliances, points out, "no fault found" is no longer considered a product issue, but rather, a customer experience issue. And that puts the responsibility for reducing returns squarely on the shoulders of the manufacturer. One of the ways that Philips has improved its returns management has been addressing the problem at the design stage of the product, focusing on ease of use and interoperability, with the goal of making the products more customer friendly. Also, every Philips division now has a formal returns department, with bonus programs in place to encourage reduction in returns at every level. Accenture's analysis indicates that by reducing the number of "no fault found" returns by just 1%, a typical large high-tech manufacturer could save $21 million per year in return and repair costs. "These high consumer electronics return rates are unsustainable in a sector with brutal competition and thin margins," Cline points out. Manufacturers, he suggests, should help consumers "understand, set up, use and optimize the products they purchase. Most companies invest considerable sums to manage returns but need to refocus their strategies on proactively preventing returns through customer education and aftermarket support." The payoff can be significant. Hitachi America, a manufacturer of HDTVs, has developed a Service Call Avoidance program, which relies on an outsourced call center to handle complaint calls from consumers. The program is part of an ongoing effort to improve first-call completion rate, the percentage of customer complaints that can be solved on the first call. As a result of the program, the first-call completion rate has climbed from under 60% to over 90%, with 33% fewer service call referrals overall. While many manufacturers use the services of third parties specializing in reverse logistics, some are opting for a more direct route: either partnering with or acquiring outright providers of returns and asset recovery services. Avnet Inc., for instance, an electronics distributor, recently acquired Canvass Systems, a provider of remarketing, refurbishment and asset disposal services. Similarly, Ingram Micro, an electronics and IT distributor, has begun offering IT asset disposition services to its channel partners, thanks to a collaborative effort with U.S. Micro, a provider of IT recycling services. See Also:

HAMMER TO FALL

Google Adsense: Understanding Image Ads and Making Google Adsense Dollars with Writingup.com

What are image ads? Image ads are graphical ads. Unlike traditional banner ads, image ads are also targeted to the appropriate audience, just like text ads. A publisher that has a combination of image ads and text ads has a greater revenue generating potential. Image ads are only for Adsense for Content pages and not available for Adsense for Search results pages. There are 5 major formats of image ads. The Leaderboard, which is about twice the size of a banner ad, the banner image ad, the skyscraper, the wide skyscraper and the medium rectangle. Google’s technology determines on a page by page basis whether image ads, text ads, or a combination of both will make you more money and then delivers the appropriate format. You can choose to run only image ads, but Google recommends selecting both, thereby giving them a better chance to target the right advertising for your page, generating more revenue for you. Bottom line: taking these two methods together will give you the best chance at making the most revenue. How to Make Google Adsense Dollars at Writingup.com To get started blogging at writingup.com, first you’ll need to create a Google Adsense account. If you’ve already done that, you’ll just give them the same publisher id you got when you originally signed up with Google Adsense. Since you can only have one Google Adsense account, you will always use the same publisher id on every site you add. Next, you’ll create an account at writingup.com and within minutes, start blogging! You still have to follow the Google Adsense rules as to the type of content not acceptable but other than that you have carte blanche as to what to write about in your blog. Paste your writingup.com URL into your email signature and every time you send someone an email, you will be referring them to your blog, thus increasing your traffic on writingup.com. Comment on other publisher’s blogs. If you interact with the blogging community, you are more likely to have your blog read more often. Again, traffic. Writingup.com has a list of successful topics you can write about. You don’t have to choose from that list of course, but it’s quite extensive and if you look it over, you’ll probably find something that interests you. They are successful topics because they turn up in search engines a lot. More traffic. Word Count 409 PPPPP

DRAWING DRILL JIG

DRAWING DRILL JIG

PART DRAWING DRILL JIG

DRAWING WORK DRILL JIG

ART DRAWING WORK DRILL JIG

Drafting Tools - Snap and Grid

We've got snap and grid in AutoCAD. Let's talk about snap and grid. Let's see how we can use it and why we would use it. Snap restricts the cursor movements to specified intervals. That is handy. Lines will have a specific length. Still. If you're using object snaps than you can pick a point that is not on an interval that has been specified. We'll talk about object snap later. With grid switched on dots are displayed in the screen. The dots help to visualize distances. Often the grid interval is the same as the snap interval. That is important. You can have grid dots displayed in the screen. Now you want to print your drawing. The dots are not printed. OK. We know what snap and grid are. But we want to know more. We want to know how we can set the intervals and how we can switch it on and off. Let's start with setting the intervals. There are two ways for doing that. Whatever way you choose. You do it over the Drafting Settings dialog box. Click on Tools in the menu bar. A pull down menu shows up. In the pull down menu click on Drafting Settings. The Drafting Settings dialog box is displayed. There are four tabs in the Drafting Settings dialog box. The Snap and Grid tab is in front. That's exactly what we want. In the dialog box we see two check boxes and we see four areas. The checkboxes can be used for switching on or off snap and grid. Let's have a look at the Snap area and the Grid area. First the Snap area. In that area you can enter values for the spacing. You can enter a value for the X spacing and you can enter a value for the Y pacing. The spacing set the interval I was talking about. There is more you can do in that area. You can enter an angle, an X base, and a Y base. The angle gives the angle of the snap intervals. Most of the time you do not change the angle. You leave the angle at zero. But the X base and the Y base. What's that? The X base and the Y base gives the starting point of the snap. As before. Do not change it. Leave it as it is. At zero. You now know how you can do the settings for the snap. You do it in the Snap area of the Drafting Settings dialog box. But we can also do something with the settings of the grid. That is done in the Grid area of the dialog box. This time we can do less. We can only change the X spacing and the Y spacing. We cannot change the angle or the X base and Y base of the grid. This is what is done most of the time. Most of the time the spacing for the grid is the same as the spacing for the snap. That is what is happening. The grid follows the snap settings for angle and the X base and Y base. So there is no need to change those settings. This is what we now saw. You can do the settings of the snap and the grid in the Drafting Settings dialog box. And you can switch them on and off. Before I continue. I must tell you about the third area in the Drafting Settings dialog box. It is the Snap style and type area. For the snap type we can set Grid snap and we can set PolarSnap. If we go for a Grid snap type then e can select a rectangular snap or an isometric snap. If you're creating isometric drawings, then you want to go for an isometric snap. The snap will have the isometric angles. I'm not going to talk about PolarSnap now. I will do that later. I will do that as we're talking about Polar Tracking. In the next article. But there is another way. Look at your screen. Do you see the status bar? In the status bar there are two buttons. In the status bar there is the Snap button and there is the Grid button. You can click on the buttons. To have snap and grid switched on and off. Something else you can do with the buttons. You can right click them. If you do a short cut menu is displayed. If you right click the Snap button then you'll find the following options in the shortcut menu: -PolartSnap On -Grid Snap On -Off -Settings If you right click on the Grid button then you'll find the following options in the shortcut menu: -On -Off -Settings You can imagine where the on and off options stand for. Those options can be sued to switch snap and grid on or off. But we already saw. There is a quicker way. We can also click on the Snap and Grid buttons in the status bar. In fact. There is another quick way. You can press the F7 function key to switch grid on or off. And you can press the F9 function key to switch snap on or off. Oh. In the shortcut menu under the Snap button you also see the PolarSnap On option. As I said before. We'll talk about it alter. But there is the Settings option in the shortcut menus under the Snap button and the Grid button. Click on that option. If you do the Drafting Settings dialog box is opened. We already have seen what can be done in the Drafting Settings dialog box. But this is what we now know. Using the shortcut menu under the Snap and Grid button. That is a quicker way to open the Drafting Settings dialog box. This is it for today. Now you know everything that you need to know about snap and grid. Tomorrow we're going to talk about polar tracking. See you tomorrow.

New Way of Creating AutoCAD Drawings

You can sue this way. If you're creating 2D drawings and 3D drawings. If you follow this way, you're saving a lot of time. The new way of creating CAD drawings is all about creating a 3D drawing first and then using that drawing to create your 2D drawing. In this course is explained how it is done. More. There is even explained how you can add dimensions to your 2D drawing. Let's make a good start. We start with creating a 3D drawing. It's going to be a simple drawing. But that doesn't matter. We open AutoCAD. We start with a new drawing. We draw a rectangle. The size of the rectangle is 200 by 100. And we draw a circle. The comes is drawn in the left side of the rectangle. The diameter of the circle is 100. It fits nicely in the rectangle. This is the base of the 3D drawing. Let's extrude the rectangle and the circle. We give them a height of 50. And a taper angel of zero. We now have two 3D objects. Let's make one 3D object. We use the UNION command. You know that command. You know what to do. To see the 3D model clearly we go to a 3D view of the drawing. Next we save the drawing. Give it the name 3D drawing.