Do you sometimes find yourself fiddling around on the internet for hours on end when you should be doing something more useful with your time? Do you want to kill that temptation so you can actually get stuff done? If so, here is a simple trick that any semi-savvy computer user can do to block “time-waster” sites that suck away hours of your precious time.

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“When you finish with high school, get into a good college immediately, then find a good company to work for. Bust your ass for forty years and then retire.”

Forty years ago this was awesome advice. (more…)

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I just noticed a savvy internet businessman use an intruiging technique to increase the accuracy of his email open statistics. If you don’t already know, email open rates are not very reliable. This is because they typically rely on embedding a very small image file into the email.  The sender can then see how many people requested that image by looking at their webserver logs, and guesstimate how many people opened the email. This is inaccurate because not everyone has images enabled. They are essentially untracked (unless tracked by some other metric like clicks.)

So the open rate stats are probably underreported. I’m not sure exactly by how much. To increase the response rate, you need to give your reader a reason to turn images on. Perhaps include a graph, or some other image that adds to the content of the email. Or even a superfluous image of a cat with a line underneath it saying “If you can’t see this cute cat, turn on images in your email client”. If you can increase the value to your customers with images, it will increase their value to you as well.

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