How-To

The How & How Much: Starting a Photography Business

As the economy continues to crawl ever so slowly out of the recent recession, more and more people are starting their own businesses out of their homes to make a living. One of those start-up businesses can be a photography company. So many people out there claim to enjoy taking pictures, and some people are … Read more →

3 Facebook Privacy Settings Everybody Should Know (+ Fun Videos)

A few months ago, Facebook popped up on most user’s screens, asking to modify privacy settings according to new settings offered by Facebook. Undoubtedly, many users just clicked through it and adapted the privacy settings suggested by Facebook, probably leaving your profile more open than it was before. No matter what, it’s a good idea … Read more →

How To: iCal Birthday Reminders With Alarm (iCalBirthdays 2.0)

Here’s a quick and really neat trick for Mac users who would like to have birthdays listed in iCal. As default, your Mac will easily display birthdays in iCal, based on dates from your Addressbook, but it can’t give you an alarm and there’s no way to modify the events to do so. So, somebody … Read more →

Gmail Tip: Trick Gmail Into Checking Your POP3 Accounts Often

I recently moved away from MobileMe as my primary Inbox, to which I had a few other e-mail accounts forward e-mail to. I was happy with MobileMe as my e-mail provider, except for the fact that some e-mails never arrived, not even in my spam/junk folder. I investigated and found out that the sending SMTP … Read more →

How To: QuickTime X Autoplay Movies On Open In Snow Leopard

QuickTime X is the newest version of QuickTime Player for Mac which comes with the new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, a major leap forward that advances modern media and Internet standards. QuickTime X includes a brand-new player application, offers optimized support for modern codecs, and delivers more efficient … Read more →

Retain Visitors To Your Site And Increase Sales Conversions: Exit Grabber Review

Exit Grabber pop-up: Text-based example.
Exit Grabber pop-up: Text-based example.

You want better sales conversions or membership registrations on your website, am I right? Because, after all, that’s what puts food on the table. And beer in the fridge. After having this software recommended by a good friend and Internet marketing guru, I suggested to one of my clients that they gave it a try.

Months later, the results are in.

Allow me to cut to the chase, while Exit Grabber claims to be able to boost sales by 327%, my client “only” saw an increase in membership registration of around 26% per month, compared to a usually very steady membership registration flow. To be honest, that’s not a bad increase at all, considering the price of Exit Grabber is only around 80 bucks. And if they didn’t have this software on their site, the users would  just have left the website, never to return again. And never become a paying member.

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How to make the perfect Cappuccino, or: How I learned to stop worrying and making my own cappuccino

Apple logo foamHave you ever wondered how the restaurants made your cappuccino? Because I have, so I decided to go out and buy some rather cheap espresso machine with a steam wand, just to try it out myself. I like coffee and cappuccino, but I prefer to enjoy when I’m out, so when I’m at home, I mostly drink sometimes in the mornings or in the evenings if I feel like making one.

Here’s how I make a cappuccino, as good as possible, with the equipment I have to my disposal:

1: If possible, use a metal pitcher. Make sure to chill it first, this will better the foam.

2: Fill metal pitcher with “half a mug” of fresh whole milk, that hasn’t been steamed before. For my cappuccinos, I use 2 espresso shots, which equals pretty much 1 coffee cup. I’ll be using the same amount of milk, as the 2 espresso shots – and then pour it together in a mug afterwards.

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How to get Twitter followers that matters

twitter_logo“Oh no, not another one of those get-thousands-of-followers-scams”, you think? You’re in luck, because it’s not. I hate those and they don’t add anything of value to your Twitter experience (so I’ve heard, but it makes sense to me).

In 10 days of being a Twitter user, I have 43 followers – of which, I only know 2 of them personally. So what about the other 41 followers? Well, I was stunned to see people follow me, even after having made only one or two tweets in total (about nothing even worth mentioning).

After a while, I learned that if I made a tweet about “poker”, shortly after I would receive one or two followers that have also tweeted about poker in the past. And if that’s not the case, then people are usually just following you, hoping that you will follow them back. I don’t mind following back, as long as I find their previous tweets interesting – that’s really what matters to me. But if I see somebody following me, that has more followers than he is following himself, then I tend to think here’s a guy that doesn’t just follow me hoping I will follow back, he actually has more followers than he’s following. There’s a catch though – in theory, he could have just unfollowed say 1,000 users recently, bringing his following down to 8,500 while he himself is being followed by 9,000. I’m not sure whether or not there’s a tool to “batch unfollow”, otherwise this process seems a bit “too much” just to get some followers…

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