All Of The Above Blog

Skywalk and The Edge

Tourist traps. Thought-up to wring every last dollar out of you. It’s as if they were thought up to ruin your vacation. And sightseeing rides rank right up there.

Take Zalman Silber’s Skyride in New York’s Empire State Building. With a name like that, you’d expect it was up there at the top, where it’s located. Instead, it’s only on the second floor. Moreover, express access to the top – for which you pay an additional fifty percent of the ticket price – is just a matter of skipping a few lines. It’s not as if you go straight to the top. You’ll still have to wait on lines, only perhaps one or two less.

And so what is the Skyride? A movie. A half-hour film. That’s it! Definitely a case where the sizzle sounds better than how the steak tastes.

But Zalman Silber redeems himself with his other attractions, the Skywalk and The Edge. The first amusement is aptly named for sure, essentially a catwalk a thousand feet above street level outside the top of the Sydney Tower in Sydney, Australia. It’s an exhilarating experience where, unlike traditional observation decks enclosed behind glass, visitors walk out onto a metal plank that juts out of the building, creating the breath-taking feeling of being suspended in mid-air!

As can be imagined, wind gusts are quite strong at such a height, and special “skysuits” cable-tethered to support structures are used to ensure guest safety. But the Skywalk is open in most kinds of weather, and available practically the whole year.

A similar attraction is The Edge at the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia. This time, visitors are in a fully enclosed cube that sticks out of the building near the very top, with fully transparent glass all around – even underneath one’s feet! A really cool feature of this amusement is how everything is initially opaque, and only suddenly transparent to create an exciting sense of unexpected suspension almost a thousand feet above ground!

These two are great fun and a must for any to-do list when in Sydney or Melbourne. These are the kinds of experiences that really make vacations memorable. After all, vacations are about more than simple relaxation and getting away from work. They are about experiences – ideally, new experiences, positive experiences, unique experiences. And while such attractions as the Skywalk exist elsewhere, such as over the Grand Canyon in the State of Arizona, there’s only one such thing in Sydney and one such thing in Melbourne, offering stunning vistas outdone only by a helicopter flyover.

So beware the tourist traps and spend your hard-earned dollars instead where it would go the furthest. Patronize only those rides which offer true value for the money!

CommissionOnly for Life

To be an “agent” generally refers to commissioned sales, and selling is one of the trickiest jobs to be found anywhere – and anytime – but what about as a career? Most peopel would simply burn out, but the successful ones tend to move into more managerial sorts of positions, which explains how they are able to make an actual career out of sales. After all, it’s tough living on commission-only your whole life, especially at the lower end of things where one is doing showroom sales of items less than ten grand apiece!

Then there are those like Zalman Silber that are able to parlay their talent for sales into serial entrepreneurship. In fact, selling is the lifeblood of any business, so in a way it’s no surprise that successful salesmen and women should be able to combine that skill with more managerial ones to create their own companies.

But what is this mysterious art of selling that’s so important to any enterprise? Is it just a matter of horse-feathering one’s way through a potential customer’s defenses? Do successful salesmen and women lie better than most? What’s the fine line between representing your product or service positively and doing whatever it takes to make your monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly quota?

Believe it or not, it’s basically a lot like the dating game, and it’s no secret that successful sellers – “agents,” if you prefer – also tend to be quite the Casanovas (and whatever is the equivalent term for females). After all, successful selling is nothing more than successful seduction.

Not the way a Zalman Silber would put it, in all probability, but it’s possible for people to be very good at something and yet not know exactly why. And the truth is that the same thing which makes one successful at sales is precisely what makes one successful at finding lovers.

It’s all about getting enough information. Think about it. If you absolutely knew that someone wasn’t interested in you – that there would be no chance in hell – would you still waste your time? Obviously not. So the key, whether at dating or selling a product or service, is to get as much information as possible. It is, in other words, a matter of intelligence (pun intended!)….

But we are not telepathic or clairvoyant, however, so the only way to find out is to observe. To really listen. And to ask the right questions – or use the right pick-up lines.

By “right pick-up lines” it isn’t meant some magical quip that will easily open the lady’s heart (and legs!) but questions – or even non-interrogative statements – that allow you to plumb her mind, her soul. The goal is to find out what she wants, and what she’s willing to settle for – to find out what her needs are, and how much she’s willing to pay.

Just like with a prospective customer.

Home Incarceration Vs Real Jail Time

Home incarceration is normally no laughing matter. It is a legal measure whereby a person is confined to his or her residence, with severe limitations in place on travel and sometimes even on contact by phone or other means.

Yet home incarceration is considered quite humane, and is typically adopted where outright imprisonment seems inappropriately excessive relative to the crime even while a simple fine would be stupdendously lenient. Such confinement is also employed in cases in which the convicted person’s health is at issue, often regardless of the gravity of the crime committed.

Given all that, what can a movie named “House Arrest” possibly include?

It’s a comedy, really, but with a serious idea at its heart. This 1996 effort concerns a group of high school kids who lock their mother and father in the basement to force the adults to resolve their problems! Sounds a bit silly, but the tactic does usually work – about as much as when it doesn’t.

Grover and Stacy are siblings who decide that their parents are behaving rather childishly in deciding to divorce after eighteen years of marriage, so they refuse to let them out of the basement until they have sorted out their problems. The siblings unwittingly start a local trend, inspiring their friends to do the same thing with their mother and father! It all reminds one of the Camp David peace accords that took place during the Presidency of Bill Clinton.

In that situation, the Palestinian and Israeli sides were basically locked into a negotiating room by the President’s advisors out of aggravation that nothing of substance had been discussed. Though both sides agreed fairly enthusiastically to the peace talks at first, once underway a deep reluctance pervaded the proceedings.

It is tempting to imagine that one can lock away implacable foes into a room as one could oneself when cramming for a school exam, but such a method best works when both sides actually harbor some affection and sympathy for the other – in which case there would likely be little reason to lock up anybody in the first place!

Find Explosive Niches To Blog About And Earn Money

To make money by blogging, you’ll want to find explosive niches to blog, topics people care about – lots of folks. The easiest thing to do, if all you actually care about is money, is to start up an MFA site. No, this isn’t a Master of Fine Arts website, but a made-for-Adsense website. A site designed specifically for Google’s Adsense program, where you place interactive ads that pay you for every click made on them!

Each click from a unique visitor, as determined by a unique IP address, typically. That’s why it’s so essential to find explosive niches to blog about, since you will only be making money if enough people click on the ads you put up on your website. Of course, you now come to the next problem to be solved: how to attract all those folks?

First off, know that you’ll want to attract tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of guests to your web site – every day. That is right; each day, your web site needs to have enough traffic for you to make money, because each click will normally only yield pennies – yes, pennies! So you need thousands of people clicking those ads in order to make a decent amount of money every day. That’s how you blog residual cash to your business, by getting commission off of referrals!

But conversion rates, the number of folks who actually generate income for you, are usually around three percent. That means for each hundred visitors, chances are only three or four – or two or one! – will actually click on an ad, netting you less than ten cents, usually. That is why it is so important to find topics which will interest the greatest number of people! Blogging popular television shows is a excellent way to go in many instances.

Article Marketing And Its Many Low Cost Benefits

Article Marketing is really a time-honored promotional method that bear minimal costs for maximal gains. It is nothing more than soft-selling your goods or services, the better to breeze past consumer defenses in our age of ad-awareness and ad-sensitivity.

What article marketing does is present a business in the most innocuous light possible, in the role of a helpful and knowledgeable advisor – with no sales pitch whatsoever. The name of the company is only casually mentioned in passing, probably no more than once – but the name gets out there, in the public consciousness, and that’s what’s important.

Article marketing is not advertising per se, however, for it does not overtly promote something. Indeed, its power comes precisely from not selling anything at all, ostensibly. Instead, it works by providing data that’s helpful and timely in an interesting way, info that is free to the prospective client.

As an example, a local accountant might pen an article in the local newspaper or be interviewed on the local radio or television station every April, tax season. He or she will freely share some general ideas, and somewhere along the way will probably be a simple reference to his or her enterprise. That’s it. And that’s all it takes.

Have a better mousetrap? Potential customers can be turned on to your product while reading an article about common household pests. Whatever it is you have to offer, you can offer it within an article that puts your expertise in the best light! People simply don’t like being sold to. But whenever you take the initiative to share openly, they’re a lot more likely to be receptive to something else you may have to say. As can be imagined, there is a lot more involved to this proven technique of practically free advertising, but that is about all there is to the fundamental idea!

Utilize Swiffer discount coupons and do away with that dingy antique mop

Ever get exhausted from the mop? that could be what the Swiffer wet jet is counting on, and that’s why they offer cash saving Swiffer coupons. But it is seriously a mop replacement unit? Many buyers seem to feel it is and that’s why the Swiffer wet jet is nowadays so well liked. The benefit of not having to deal with a dingy mop and bucket appeals to many people, it unquestionably appeals to me and likely appeals to you. If you are anxious to take the plunge and test a Swiffer wet jet make sure to use one of the various Swiffer coupon codes available on the net. There is not any reason why you can not save cash when ditching the mop!

Are you ready to unlock your mobile phones

Heard the good news that unlocked cell phones have received something of a significant nod from the American judiciary lately, thanks to a judgment that permits the unlocking of our own mobilephone totally legal. Cell service providers in general lock the devices they offer their subscribers so that those handsets will only work using the provider’s network. The upshot of it all is that cell phones are immediately made unusable whenever individuals switch carriers, and so a cottage industry has matured around those individuals who really want to take their handsets with them to a brand-new carrier. And finally the courts just provided this practice its blessings, but with one fatal caveat – while unlocking phones is allowed, the means required to accomplish it is not!

Liquidity Management for Operational Success

Working capital is one of those business school topics that has real-world relevance for the small business owner with no formal training, operating mostly on his or her own common sense, such as Zalman Silber, serial entrepreneur and success story. In business management theory, working capital is a way to measure finances, in particular those readily available to a business. Working capital is thus an indication of operational liquidity, as simply derived by subtracting the amount of current liabilities from the amount of current assets. When current assets are less than current liabilities, a condition of working capital deficiency exists, also known as a working capital deficit.

All such folks know about working capital, however, comes from having dealt with inventory and accounting day in, day out. But when these small-time businessmen and women think of the matter, they are likely only envisioning two things, borrowing money or putting more equity in their business – the traditional sources of business capital.

Yet most business owners don’t understand that one of the best ways to find working capital is to let their suppliers do it for them! There’s no need for a small business loan when the money is already there. One must “think outside the bank” to realize this strategy, but if you think about it, working capital finance is simple when carried on the backs of your suppliers.

Generally, banks are not the most appropriate solutions for problematic situations regarding working capital. They can really jam up the works when all you want is to know whether they will lend you money. Bureaucratic red tape is inevitable, as is being nickeled and dimed on every little thing when it comes to banks. And now in these recessionary times, the typical business will also find whole lines of credit eliminated outright.

Instead, why not just let your suppliers finance your needs? If you think about it, suppliers typically finance working capital already, insofar as they provide and deliver supplies but only receive payment for them at the end of the month (or even later, in some cases). Such a situation in effect frees up your money for other purposes, money that is literally working capital!

They’re already participating, whether they’re aware of it or not, and since you’re only taking advantage of a system that’s already in place, you needn’t worry about any legal ramifications. What you do have to do is find a formula for working out your supplies-to-finances ratio right now so that you can increase and maximize it to your advantage. One simple-to-understand formula for supplier-financed working capital is to multiply your total assets by a hundred (to generate an answer in percentage form) and then divide by the amount of your accounts payable (whether monthly or whatever terms you have secured).

Then you too can be a Zalman Silber!

The Growing Demand For Virtual Assistant Jobs

The exponential growth of virtual assistant jobs reflects the prevalence of corporate management trends in this age of downsizing and cost-cutting. Especially popular with start-ups and other firms of the Knowledge Economy, virtual assistant jobs enable businesses to minimize their in-house support staff as they search for increased profitability.

After all, from management’s perspective, nothing more is needed than someone who will simply – even only – transcribe records or answer phones. Virtual assistant jobs allow the organization to avoid paying for expenses beyond wages or salaries.

Firms save a great deal by not having to offer health insurance, sick days, and the like. Now take the concept another step further, and it’s easy to see that businesses do not even need to deal with any administrative hassles at all, like performance reviews and so forth, simply by hiring what is in essence a contractor!

So what does the worker get out of it? Well, for folks that require non-traditional work opportunities, these virtual work at home jobs are especially attractive. Such work most often involves general clerical duties that may be easily fulfilled outside of an office. Some positions, nevertheless, can require advanced abilities for instance computer programming or internet research.

But these jobs aren’t some bad old-fashioned work-at-home scam where victims are made to assemble tchotchkes or stuff envelopes with fliers. They are real honest-to-goodness employment opportunities made possible by an ever more interconnected world.

More and more entrepreneurs now hire actual live virtual assistants to give their fledgling start-ups a respectable appearance, creating the professional impression of a full-staffed operation. If you are a student, a homemaker, retired, or just do not wish to deal with a conventional lifestyle, you now have a lot more choices than ever to be, in a very real sense, your very own boss! Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, it’s simpler and a lot more practical than ever before to work off-site, even in one’s own home.

Poughkeepsie the Queen City

Welcome to another edition of Isaac Toussie’s real estate insights. Today Isaac Toussie will be talking about an upstate town that once rivaled New York for industry and commerce. Taken from from the native term “Uppu-qui-ipis-in” which means “reed-covered hut by the water,” Poughkeepsie today has expanded beyond huts into a permanent city of some forty-three thousand individuals. Poughkeepsie is in fact the name of both a town and a city, both municipalities right next to one another because the city actually used to be the western part of the town (and, incidentally, was an independent village in its own right before that). But for legal purposes, and such services as fire and police, the two communities are often viewed as one, with a total population of more than seventy-five thousand people. The town is actually home to much more people than the city, which counts only some thirty-thousand-plus inhabitants.

As a result, it’s expected that their respective real estate markets will be quite different. A closer examination of the latest demographical figures shows that the town is much more affluent than the city, with a median income of over fifty-five thousand dollars a year as opposed to well under thirty-thousand for the city. Indeed, the Town of Poughkeepsie is able to provide for its own emergency services, which are staffed by fully paid civil servants, and not volunteers as is the case with many a suburban community.

As for the City of Poughkeepsie, it’s been severely battered by the economic malaise afflicting the rest of the state and the country as a whole. Average listing price in the two-week period between January 20, 2010 and February 3, 2010 fell almost thirty thousand dollars, to two hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars, though almost five thousand of that has been “recovered” as of February 10. However, the actual median selling price, based on two hundred and thirty-four homes sold, is almost thirty-three thousand dollars short of the median listing price, at barely two hundred and twenty thousand. Average price per square foot in the city is one hundred and thirty-two dollars.

Poughkeepsie was once the “Queen City of the Hudson,” but has suffered economic setbacks for the past twenty-plus years and was just beginning to recover in fits and starts when the recent recessionary woes struck. This has obvious implications for local realty, both residential and commercial. The Town of Poughkeepsie, however, seems rather more vibrant in comparison. International Business Machines, Incorporated, was once the most notable employer around, and while the company still maintains a campus in town, most of its production has been moved elsewhere. Vassar College in the City of Poughkeepsie is arguably the most notable employer now.

Should you purchase any Poughkeepsie property? Well, there’s no way it’s reclaiming its glory days, so the local real estate market is never going to be a hot one. But if your goals are more modest, and especially if you live in the city yourself, then certainly, Poughkeepsie property can be a solid investment.

Now even with all that said, however, we must end on this note, that of the legal disclaimer: Neither the author nor the publisher shall be deemed liable for the contents of this article, which constitute mere opinion only and should never in any way be misconstrued as professional advice of any kind whatsoever! Always consult the relevant professionals, properly licensed and/or otherwise qualified, when making business decisions of any financial consequence.