Bill Gates's Top 10 Rules For Success (@BillGates) - Part 3

How have you done your market research for your business? Would you use a telephone marketing company? Perhaps call your clients and customers and ask for their input?  Have you considered simply using email or online survey?  It may take a little more effort but this article covers reasons to consider and tips for using this approach.  The article is in three parts.  Welcome back to Part 3 with today’s 4 tips.  Let me know how useful you find this article with a comment below.

Successful Surveys: 10 Tips for Better Results – Part 3

By: Kathy Gulrich

Why would you use an email or online survey when you could simply call your clients and customers and ask for their input?

Lots of reasons.

·         standardization

·         easy to get large numbers of responses

·         easy to tabulate, analyze

·         easy (and often fun) for your clients and customers

·         inexpensive

·         non-intrusive

·         time-efficient (for you, and for your clients and customers)

·         protect your customers' anonymity (if important)

·         professional

·         no "cold calls"

·         no answering machines!

And have you figured out how long it would take to have 100 fifteen-minute conversations instead? (I don't have to do the math to know that it's WAY too long!)

So in this article, I'm going to talk surveys. How to find them, how to do them, and how to make the most of your results. Here goes....

do complete, the more responses you're likely to get.

7 - Analyze Results

Once all the answers have come in, look at them carefully. What does the "quantitative" data tell you? Slice and dice the numbers to learn all you can from the responses you get.

If you use a survey service that offers them, check your data in different formats, from pie charts to graphs.

And just as importantly, what "qualitative" information comes through?

·         what's the general feeling you get from the open-ended responses?

·         how enthusiastic were the respondents to share their views?

·         what's your "gut" telling you?

8 - Use Results to Improve Your Business

One thing I've learned over the years is that people don't always do what they "say" they're going to do on surveys! And in that sense, surveys can be misleading.

In terms of trends, directions, feelings, interests, etc., however, results tend to be pretty accurate.

Net net?

Proceed boldly, but with caution. (Always test before you make a BIG leap!)

9 - Use the Report as a Special Offer

Let's face it, humans are pretty curious. We send in our answers to a survey or questionnaire, and then wonder what all the OTHER people had to say.

Capitalize on this curiosity! You can:

·         offer the report/analysis as a "thank you" for responding (this will help increase your response)

·         write up a special report, and turn it into a passive income product (particularly useful for hard-to-get information in a narrow market niche)

10 - Use Surveys Often

They're easy. They give us tons of helpful information. Our clients enjoy them. They're often free. They give us practically real-time answers.

Let's face it ... a survey is a terrific tool, and if you haven't yet, I hope you'll give one a try soon.

Author Bio
Best-selling author Kathy Gulrich helps clients get from idea, to action, to results - more quickly, and more easily - whether they're looking to write a book, develop a new product, or market their product or business. Clients love her direct, no-nonsense approach - and her gentle insistence on great results. Find out for yourself: Check out one of Kathy's teleclasses, or pick up a free worksheet, 

at www.smARTbusinessCoaching.com

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Source: By Kathy Gulrich

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How Search Engines Work

Ever wondered what makes search engines work so fast? Find out here in this video.  Understand this and you will understand how you can ensure your website is found as easily as possible in searches for the content of your website to attract much more traffic.

How Search Engines Work

By: David Tang

A search engine operates, in the following order: 1) Crawling; 2) Deep Crawling Depth-first search (DFS); 3) Fresh Crawling Breadth-first search (BFS); 4) Indexing; 5) Searching.

Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider) - an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.

The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch and many others.

Author Bio

David is the leader of a software development team, who developed many types of automation software. One of them is www.ArticlePostRobot.com, the software which can post articles to hundreds of article sites and mail lists automatically. Demo is available upon request at help(at)articlepostrobot.com

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http://www.articlegeek.com/internet/seo_search_engine_optimization/how_search_engines_work.htm