Pro global business

As one of Southern California’s leading schools of business, George L. Graziadio School of Business and Management aims for the highest standards in terms of academic and professional practices.

Their MBA Programs are designed to cater for both full time and part time students as well as those at executive level who desire a high calibre education in entrepreneurial skills and advanced business studies.

The Graziadio School endeavours to provide courses that are globally orientated whilst remaining ethically focused for the next generation of entrepreneurs from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. Its mission statement affirms the school’s edicts to maintain the highest level of education in a sector that will produce some of the finest business people of their generation.

The emphasis is on business, which means keeping completely up to date with the fast changing world of business and business practices. The George L. Graziadio School of Business and Management maintains highly qualified faculty who are experienced not only in the classroom, but also in the real world of day to day business and the constantly altering diversity of the business world.

If you are deadly serious about furthering your professional business studies to MBA level and beyond, The George L. Graziadio School of Business and Management should be at the top of your list of seats of learning and achievement. Please click the link below for more details.

This post is sponsored by The George L. Graziadio School of Business and Management

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

The Honest Way Blog has been around for several months now in this layout and format and it’s quite a pleasant place. But lately, there seems to be a bit of a trend around with many bloggers changing their complete template.

Is this really necessary?

Is it because there are now some very professional looking blog templates available with three columns? Admittedly they give you more space for advertising. Or more space to fill up with something, at any rate. Or is it just a case of the grass looking greener on the other side of the fence? Is that why I’m even contemplating giving myself a whole load of work in changing the entire look of this blog.

And if I change the look of the blog, should I then go the whole hog and change the look of my entire site? As the main site is something I built myself (taken from a free template but extensively re-written by me) it would be a step backwards to have the entire site built out of a Wordpress template, because that would beg the question “Why did I go to all the trouble to learn how to build websites in the first place?”

Or should I leave the site as is and just change the blog?

I need some people to talk me out of this (or otherwise). What do you think?

Leave me a comment and let me know should I keep this blog the way it is or change it.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

If you like to make purchases online and let’s face it, an awful lot of us do, it’s always a delightful experience when we find a way of obtaining a discount. It’s especially agreeable if the online store isn’t giving anything away, but a third party knows how to get you that discount.

There are a number of websites around that are dedicated to sniffing out discount coupons on a wide range of products and services. The Honest Way would like to comment on CouponKathy.com.

What makes this particular site worthy of a close look is that it divides down into several stores that all have discount coupons that they’ll accept as part of your payment for their products or services. I myself have used their services in the past to obtain discount GoDaddy coupons, which is where I usually register new domains. Another caters for the crafts store, joann fabrics coupons.

When you go to CouponKathy.com you’ll see all the stores that they have coupons for listed in their sidebar. The website is very easy to navigate through and is neatly laid out so that browsing through is a pleasurable experience.

Each store has its own page with instructions telling you exactly how to use the coupons when making a purchase. This is very useful and can save a lot of confusion.

So if you’re about to make an online purchase, check out CouponKathy.com first as they might just have a discount coupon to save you some money!

This post is sponsored by CouponKathy.com.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

I found a great article at Buzzoodle for creating marketing buzz around the internet. Check it out:

99 Free or low cost tools to spread your message online.

Social Bookmarking / News

• www.digg.com
• del.icio.us
• www.stumbleupon.com
• www.reddit.com
• www.furl.net
• www.netscape.com
• www.blinklist.com
• www.feedmelinks.com
• http://myweb.yahoo.com
• www.newsvine.com
• www.sixapart.com
• blogmarks.net
• www.rojo.com
• www.shoutwire.com
• http://spurl.net
• http://simpy.com
• http://nowpublic.com
• www.blinkbits.com
• http://kinja.com/
• www.blogmemes.net

 For the rest of the 99 click here: Buzzoodle

PLEASE use the comments on this post to let us know if any of these are great, bad or we missed any great ones that people should use.

 Very cool, thanks Ron, you da man!

No matter what religion you are faith is the cornerstone. You believe in God without seeing or talking to him/her. That’s faith at its finest. After all scientists will tell you there is no proof of God. But yet we still have faith.

    

We go to worship and pray for an afterlife that will bring us happiness and peace. I have faith and I have never seen or spoken to God (and I mean God has never spoken directly to me).  

Branding is a lot like faith. It’s hard to see, touch and feel, but its there. It secretly brews within its target market base and flourishes. It protects your company, grows and takes on a life of its own.

It’s very hard to prove that branding is doing its job for a company. There aren’t many proven vehicles that say you made so many sales based on your branding efforts. But those sales are coming from branding. Trust me, branding is there and doing its job…. Just have faith.

An avid Apple user, Nick Haley made his own commercial and posted it on YouTube:

 

So how did Apple respond? They flew Nick and his idea out to LA and produced his idea professionally. That’s pretty cool and speaks volumes about Apple.

Just like our post about Sonic, Apple follows suit with spreading the word in a strategic branding sense. Instead of Apple sending Nick the old cease and desist they sent him a love letter.

The result, some pretty great PR and an overall feeling of connecting to their customer base. Apple rocks!

Alex Rodriguez is going to leave his mark in baseball history as probably the greatest player that ever lived. Check that, the greatest regular season player that ever lived. A-Rod is a proven loser. This is a fact. His brand image is bad, very bad.

 

Here’s the problem; A-Rod is perceived to be greedy, conceded, egotistical, choker, dirty, poor sport and many other bad adjectives. He’s been on 3 teams that have all failed miderably in the playoffs.

A-Rod can do it all. Except win the important games. Ask yourself this. If you owned a company an had a salesperson that could bring in all the best clients but when it came time to sign them he choked would you keep him? And would you pay him insane money?

A-Rod’s brand is confusing. If I were him I’d get myself a new agent, PR firm and branding consultant. They’re not doing a good job. He should be beloved, not hated. Your personal branding is very important when you’re a sports star.

I know Boston fans cheered “don’t sign A-Rod”. That’s pretty strange since he’s the ball player he is. He’s a jinx. He’s a team divider. He’s bad news and whomever signs him for the 300 million he’s looking for is destined to be the next loser.

In my search for a good video conferencing company I came across a company called AccuConference. Whenever I need to purchase a service I like to do my due diligence so a review of the company’s brand identity and website is the first place I start.

  

The logo makes sense from a visual perspective. It connects people together via video conferencing or teleconferencing. It’s not the most creative logo but it suits the purpose of being literal. The next thing I look for is a tagline. Unfortunately there is no real tagline here. Just a description of their services. 

Next I look at the company’s website. It’s somewhat cluttered but pretty easy to navigate. I don’t like how long you have to scroll but that’s not a horrible thing. I really like the use of their corporate blue and yellow as it makes their branding appear seamless and natural. That’s right on point from a branding perspective. 

Now I’m looking for an offer or a call to action. They do have a sign up button on the homepage which is nice. I also like the live chat feature. That demonstrates a dedication to service which is a major part of the branding for any company.  

From a branding perspective this video conferencing company looks like it could be a good one and someone I will call for our needs. I hope they can deliver on their brand promise and ultimately provide the type of service they claim they do. If so we could be partners for years to come.

The Honest Way says “Beware, bloggers with new upgraded page ranks, there be snakes in the grass!”

I mean spammers who have an uncanny knack of sniffing out newly promoted blogs and upping their quota of spam comment attacks.

It never ceases to amaze me how they can have the intelligence to find the right sites and blogs to spam on, yet they display the utmost stupidity when it comes to using that knowledge to actually gain some link love from these blogs that they’ve gone to so much trouble to sniff out.

My advice to all bloggers is to unite to stamp out this menace by strangling and smothering their outlets. It’s easy to do and you’ll be doing your blog a big favour by not inadvertently allowing even one of these spam comments to slip though and be spidered by the search engines.

What do you mean?

I mean that if even one of these spammers manages to get a link back to one of their sites from a comment you display, the search engines may penalize your blog severely for linking to a possibly banned site at worst or a pornographic, hate, racist or other known spamming one at best. It could get your blog de-indexed, that’s how serious it could be for you. So you need to make sure your blog is water-tight.

At the very least, enable moderation of comments on your blog. All blogging platforms allow you to do this, so you have no excuse for not moderating comments. If you don’t know what that means, well it means that all comments that are made on your blog are held in a queue awaiting your approval if you want to display the comment, or deletion if you think it is spam or inappropriate. Links to spammers sites are not spidered by the search engines until you approve them.

Better is to activate a spam defence program plugin for your blog - Wordpress have one called Askimet which I use on all of my self-hosted blogs and it traps 95% of spam comments - and my moderation system traps the other 5%, so I have total control over what comments make it onto my blog’s pages.

If all bloggers stopped all spammers from obtaining even one search engine spidered link from blogs, we will have won a major battle in the war against spam.

Be vigilant and kill spam before it gets a foot in your door.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

Barcoding Inc. announced that their RFID Active Shelf Inventory System may soon spell the end for the Dewey Decimal System in libraries across the country.