Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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I wonder if I’ll live in a house or a condo when I get older?

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The other day when I was walking with my brother after we’d finished our boat cruise my brother surprised me by saying that he and his wife were thinking of moving to downtown Toronto. They currently live outside of the city in a small, but very nice town called Aurora. They’ve been busy renovating their home over the last few years. Modernizing it and just making it more comfortable for themselves.

I guess that’s why I was so surprised when he said that they, well his wife, had been thinking of looking at some condominiums in the downtown area. Of course they’re not thinking of doing this immediately. They’re getting older and as my brother said, some day they might not want to maintain a large house. A condo might be easier to manage. Plus they’d be in the city and free to do some of the things they love to do such as attending live theater and musical performances.

I’m not sure that I’ll want to live in a condo when I get older. Prior to buying this house I lived in a very tiny apartment for over a decade! I loved the neighborhood, but hated the small apartment. I’m not sure that I’d want to live in an apartment style home again when I’m older. Perhaps when that time comes I’ll settle for a one story house. No stairs to climb, everything on the same floor. I think that would be easy enough to manage. I’d also still be able to garden if I was able to – I wouldn’t be able to do that in a condo!

Anyway, I recalled this conversation when I happened upon a website called 55+ communities which lists 55 different communities across the US that have been developed especially for aging baby boomers and retired folks. If you’ve been thinking of moving to a more manageable home have a look at the site. There’s some very nice communities highlighted there.





Do you need customized intranet software for your business?

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A few years ago when I worked for a plastic surgeon I learned how important it sometimes is for businesses to have customized intranet software. Another thing that I learned from that experience is that it’s very important that whichever company you purchase customized intranet software from should have good customer service.

I was just visiting the Epazz Inc website. This is a company that specializes in customized intranet software. They work with businesses such as large corporations, the public sector and higher education institutions.

If I were looking into purchasing a web application for my business I do think that I’d consider the services of Epazz Inc. First and foremost they offer a free 30 day trial of their software. You can’t beat that! They also work to seamlessly integrate their software into your backend systems.

Their unique BoxesOS applications can be used to create virtual communities, provide powerful collaboration, as well as group scheduling, website content management and business email solutions. Their applications can be personalized right down to end-user level and can also be used to improve workflow.

To learn more about Epazz Inc’s customized intranet software visit the site and try their live demo.

Know of any good beauty, clothing or home decor affiliate programs?

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Ok I need your help.

I’ve gone and started a new blog. Well I bought the domain back in April and I’ve slowly been working on the site. I’m not yet ready to reveal the site yet, but I will tell you that it’s a shopping blog where I talk about great products for the home, beauty products, clothing, home decor items and well … you get the picture.

I’ve lined up some affiliate programs for the site. I mean if I’m talking about products I might as well throw in a few links here and there and maybe make some money right? So I’m looking for online clothing stores that have good products to talk about and affiliate or partner programs.

Actually it doesn’t have to just be clothing stores. It can be any kind of online affiliate program or store that has products for the home, bath and beauty, decor and so on.

I don’t plan on making a site full of affiliate links or anything. It has decent content, but as I said if I can hook up with some good programs that will benefit my readers and myself I might as well do it.

So if you know of any great partner programs please feel free to let me know about them. I’m all ears.

Gain some Buzz for your Business or Product by Holding an Instant Win Promotion

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Having once been a small business owner, and now being a webmaster with several websites I guess you could say that I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last decade or so thinking about sales, marketing and promotion.

Certainly many of your reading this post have your own blogs or websites, and I’m sure you try to think of new ways of promoting them from time to time in order to bring new visitors to your site. I’ve noticed that several blogs have taken to holding contests, both large and small in order to get peoples attention.

The reason why I’m thinking about business, sales and promotion is because I’ve just visited a website called Instant Win Promotions. Companies hold sweepstakes, contests and or even mail or scratch and win cards all the time in order to promote their business or a specific product that they sell.

I think Instant win cards are a great idea.

I know that there’s been times when I’ve gone to a store purposely because I knew they were giving out scratch and win cards that would give me a certain percentage off whatever I was purchasing. Most of those types of scratch and win cards only give you 10% or 15% off, but the promotion often states that some of the cards will give you and even higher percentage off. I’m sure the stores that hold these kind of promotions end up getting more customers visiting their store when they’re giving out scratch and win cards.

I’ve also received scratch and win cards in the mail. Occasionally those scratch and win cards have made me consider visiting a store, or signing up with the fitness club that was holding the promotion.

Those are just a few ways that businesses could use scratch and win cards to promote their business and draw in more customers. It’s certainly worked on me on more than one occasion.

Instant Win Promotions specializes in the creation of custom scratch off cards, pull tab cards, scratch and sniff cards, bingo cards, phone cards, and internet access cards.

If you own a business or if you have a special event coming up such as a fund raiser, and you’d like to try promoting your event or rewarding a few of the people who attend your event with great prizes via scratch and win cards, you should visit the Instant Win Promotions website. You can request information or contact the company to discuss your particular promotion. The staff will help you come up with custom instant win cards that will be sure to generate some buzz for your company or product.

Instant Win Promotions can make custom designed scratch and win cards in any color, shape or size. Along with being able to print in any quantity, their printing capabilities include custom prizes, design consultation, and even seeding $1,000,000 winners.

The company is also able to guaranteed the integrity of all promotions from start to finish as they have a series of checks and balances in place. Instant Win Promotions have multiple lockable storage areas for the scratch and win cards that they are producing, a controlled prize seeding environment and 24 hour camera surveillance.

If you click on the “Why Choose Us” link at the bottom of the main page you’ll be able to read in detail all of the features and reasons why choosing to work with Instant Win Promotions would be a smart promotional move.

The importance of search engine optimization

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I read a lot of forums, blogs and websites and one thing that strikes me time and time again is how little most people know about natural search engine optimization. The real shocker for me is that it’s not always those who are new to being a website owner that seem to not know what SEO is, but people who have been blogging or maintaining sites for years.

I believe that search engine optimization begins with the purchase of your domain name. If you are writing a site about bikes it’s important to have the word bike in your domain name. The search engines will like that and might give your site a higher standing on search engine results. After all the whole point of optimizing our sites for search engines is so that people doing searches can find us easily.

If your your site comes up on page 10 of a Google search results page it’s unlikely that you’ll have many visitors. However if you consistently pick appropriate keywords for your sites articles, article titles, page titles, site titles and even domain names you’ll have a good chance that your site will be found on the first page of search engine results.

My sites tend to do well in search engine rankings because I try to use keywords in my articles that describe the topic I’m writing about and I also try to use a descriptive title for my posts.

I shake my head when I visit a blog and see a great article about a specific topic yet the title is some off the wall line like “Yaba daba do what a day!”.

If you really aren’t sure how to optimize your site for search engines you might want to hire a search engine optimization company to help you. They can take a look at your site and do a consultation. Perhaps they’ll give you a price quote that contains a list of what they’d do to optimize your site.

Many search engine optimization services such as the one I’ve linked to above, submitawebsite.com, have information about SEO techniques that you can begin to use on your own to better your standings on search engines.

As I said earlier a SEO company will also offer a number of SEO services that you might want to use to promote your site just as text link ads, optimizing your site for search engine placement, pay per click services and management and many other services that could help your site reach number one on in the search engine results.

If you don’t have time to optimize your site for search engines on your own do look into the services of a SEO company. It’s worth it if you want to boost your traffic.

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