Out of pitch

Hi What a week it has been. Tuesday for me is band night as I play base trombone for a local band. Now Tuesday was not my night and we were near the end of our 2 hour session and the conductor chose to play A Whiter Shade of Pale. This piece of music I love and the base trombone is rather prominent in the opening bars. I sounded dreadful, I just could not hit the pitch for the opening C which was held for four beats and then change to F for continuing four beats. I was off both and I could just not hit it. We put it down to my lips being tired, which they most likely were. The fact that I had missed quite a few practices and two engagements wouldn’t have helped. But I really felt bad about that. However I resolved to be at next band practice and hope he might choose that tune again. I have been playing for quite a few years so I like to think, well I was not the only one that night. Talk to you soon Alan

Car Keys

Car Keys Several days ago as I left a meeting at a hotel; I desperately gave myself a personal TSA pat down. I was looking for my keys. They were not in my pockets. A quick search in the meeting room revealed nothing. Suddenly I realized I must have left them in the car. Frantically, I headed for the parking lot. My wife has scolded me many times for leaving the keys in the ignition. My theory is the ignition is the best place not to lose them. Her theory is that the car will be stolen. As I burst through the door, I came to a terrifying conclusion. Her theory was right. The parking lot was empty. I immediately called the police. I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and that it had been stolen. Then I made the most difficult call of all, "Honey," I stammered; I always call her "honey" in times like these. "I left my keys in the car, and it has been stolen." There was a period of silence. I thought the call had been dropped, but then I heard her voice. " You idiot", she barked, "I dropped you off!" Now it was my time to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, "Well, come and get me." She retorted, "I will, as soon as I convince this policeman I have not stolen your car." Yep it's the golden years. LOL

3 easiest ways for newbies to start affiliate marketing

With the aid of the Internet, you can almost have everything right at your fingertips. With just a few clicks you get access to thousands and even millions of pieces of information and data on virtually any field of interest. As years pass by, the Internet continuous to effect radical changes in many facets of human endeavors, including commerce. Experts say that the information space, commonly known as the “world wide web,” grows by over a million pages everyday as more and more people utilize the Internet for information, education, entertainment, business and other personal reasons. It doesn’t take a business-oriented individual to realize that this phenomenon can bring about sky-high financial gains. The Internet’s fast-growing popularity in the recent years is surely an opportunity for business that any entrepreneur would not want to miss. You might be thinking only businessmen can make much money out of the Internet, don’t you? Think again. You too can earn big bucks through the Internet even if you don’t have products to sell and high-profile and established company. How? That is through affiliate marketing. You might have come across these words over the net while surfing. Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants’ products and services. It is one of the burgeoning industries nowadays because it is proven to be cost-efficient and quantifiable means of attaining great profit both for the merchant and the affiliate and other players in the affiliate program, such as the affiliate network or affiliate solution provider. Affiliate marketing works effectively for the merchant and the affiliate. To the first, he gains opportunities to advertise his products to a larger market, which increases his chances to earn. The more affiliate websites or hard-working affiliates he gets, the more sales he can expect. By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers. When a client clicks on the link in the affiliate website, purchases the product, recommends it to others who look for the same item or buys it again, the merchant multiplies his chances of earning. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer benefits from each customer who clicks on the link in his website and who actually purchases the product or avails of the service provided by the merchant. In most cases, the affiliate gets commision per sale, which can be fixed percentage or fixed amount. If you want to be an affiliate marketer and make fortunes out of the Internet, you may follow the following three most basic and easiest ways to start an effective affiliate marketing program. First is to identify a particular thing you are interested in or passionate about so you won’t be bored and forced to develop your affiliate web site later on. Focusing on a specific area you know very well will help you bring out your best without much risks and effort. You can add a personal touch to your site and give your visitors who are possible buyers an impression that you are an expert in your field. In this way, you gain their trust and eventually encourage them to buy the products you endorse. Next is to look for good paying merchants and products or services related to your interest and create now a website. In choosing the products, you must also consider its conversion rate—the number of visitors-turned-buyers. There are various affiliate networks and affiliate solution providers that can give you info on the most profitable products and best paying merchants. The key here is, be wise enough to choose the right one. Now that you have decided where to concentrate, have chosen the products to endorse and the merchant you are supporting and have created your own web site with top level domain name and reliable hosting, you are ready to promote. This is a crucial task, since it is through this that you would be able to increase traffic to the business website, sales and of course, profit. In affiliate marketing, it is possible to earn large sums of money in a short span of time especially when you’re endorsing high-priced items. Expensive products are hard to sell; however, with the right marketing strategies and sales techniques, you can draw visitors to the merchant’s site and make them buy the products. How to promote the products, though, would need a separate discussion. Continue to educate yourself by reading books or other articles online about the best advertising techniques. Keep in mind, there is no facile and quick path towards success. Affiliate marketing may seem very tempting due to numerous encouraging testimonies of merchants and affiliate marketers alike who have benefited from it, but it entails great deal of hard work and persistence. Likewise, you need to be creative, flexible and willing to embrace new ideas to market your partners’ products until you find the perfect strategy that works for a specific market that you are targeting. Neither signing up for an affiliate program nor copying ads and leading others towards the merchants’ site doesn’t guarantee success yet. Many affiliate marketers fail to understand this, so when they don’t make sales, they quit, look for other programs and repeat the same mistake. In the end, they conclude that affiliate marketing is just one of those scams in the Internet. Even as you sleep, you can work your way to great financial success if you employ the right strategies in affiliate marketing. Be creative, be smart and surely, you’ll achieve your goals. My name is Alan Sowerby and I am a publisher, now and again in all the rubbish the guru`s are handing out I come across a top of the pile humdinger.Just watch the video you can find here, you can thank me later. http://www.urmarketer.com

Bus Driver

bus driver I would like to share an experience with you, about drinking and driving. As you well know, some of us have been known to have had near brushes with the authorities on our way home from the odd social session over the years. A couple of nights ago, I was out for a few drinks with some friends at the Marriott Hotel and had a few too many beers. Knowing full well I may have been slightly over the limit, I did something I've never done before: I took a bus home. Sure enough I passed a police road block but as it was a bus, they waved it past. I arrived home safely without incident, which was a real surprise; as I have never driven a bus before and am not sure where I got it

Health and wellbeing

“health and wellbeing” 7 Ways to Improve Your Health & Wellbeing Taking steps to improve your health and wellbeing will improve your quality of life dramatically. It’s never too late to improve your health and there are so many things you can implement into your lifestyle that will give you great results. 1. Meditate: Many people underestimate the benefits that regular meditation will have on their health and wellbeing. The benefits of regular meditation include reduced stress levels, better sleep, improved concentration and a general feeling of wellbeing. And medication isn’t has difficult as you might believe. There are many guided meditation CD’s and downloads available to enable you to experience the benefits of meditation immediately. 2. Avoid Fad Diets: Despite their popularity, fad diets are rarely beneficial to your health. They may enable you to lose weight temporarily but following a healthy balanced diet, and cutting out processed foods and junk foods is the best long term solution. 3. Sunlight: Getting out in the sunlight for at least 30 minutes a day is great for your health and wellbeing. Lack of sunlight can lead to depression, seasonal affective disorder and Vitamin D deficiency. If your lifestyle and the area that you live prevent you from getting a daily sunlight fix, consider investing in a light box. 4. Sleep: Getting enough sleep is essential to your health and well-being. The average male needs 7 hours of sleep each night, the average female needs 8 hours and teenagers and young children need far more. Lack of sleep can cause poor concentration, headaches, inability to concentrate, accidents and even death. 5. Exercise: Regular exercise is vital to your health and well-being. But you don’t need to join the gym, or take an aerobics class. Choosing an exercise program that you enjoy is more important than anything. And a daily 20 minute walk is just as good for you as any other form of exercise. 6. Listen to Music: Recent studies by scientists in Canada and Mexico have shown that listening to music you enjoy improves your health and wellbeing. This is because it increases your levels of dopamine – commonly known as the happy hormone. The studies showed that rock, classical, and jazz music had the greatest effect. 7. Lose Weight: If you’re overweight, or obese you are putting your health at risk. Being overweight can lead to diseases like heart disease, diabetes and certain types of cancer. And according to the World Health Organisation, almost 3 million people die each year as a result of being overweight. Whichever methods you choose to incorporate into your lifestyle to improve your health and well being, you will be glad that you did. Not only will you improve the quality of your life, you may also live longer.

RSS Guide

Provide Internet users with a free (or cheap) and easy advertising or online marketing opportunity for their businesses. Below are some of the RSS features that can help make your internet marketing strategies more effective. 1. Ease in content distribution services. With RSS, your business can be captured and displayed by virtually any external site, giving you an easy way to 'spread out' and advertise them. 2. Ease in regular content updates. With RSS, web contents concerning your business can now be automaticallyA GUIDE ON RSS TOOL RSS is an abbreviation that has evolved into the following, depending on their versions: • RDF Site Summary (also known as RSS 0.9; the first version of RSS) • Rich Site Summary (also known as RSS 0.91; a prototype) • Really Simple Syndication (also known as RSS 2.0) Today, RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication', and it has the following 7 existing formats or versions: • 0.90 • 0.91 • 0.92 • 0.93 • 0.94 • 1.0 • 2.0 RSS tools refer to a group of file formats that are designed to share headlines and other web content (this may be a summary or simply 1 to 2 lines of the article), links to the full versions of the content (the full article or post), and even file attachments such as multimedia files. All of these data is delivered in the form of an XML file (XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language), which has the following common names: • RSS feed • Webfeed • RSS stream • RSS channel They are typically shown on web pages as an orange rectangle that usually has the letters XML or RSS in it. RSS feeds can be used to deliver any kind of information. Some of these 'feeds' include: • Blogs feed - each blog entry is summarized as a feed item. This makes blog posts easier to scan, enabling 'visitors' to zoom in on their items of interest. • Article feed - this alerts readers whenever there are new articles and web contents available. • Forum feed - this allows users to receive forum posts and latest discussion topics. • Schedule feed - this allows users (such as schools, clubs, and other organizations) to broadcast events and announce schedule changes or meeting agendas. • Discounts or Special feed - this is used to enable users (such as retail and online stores) to 'deliver' latest specials and discounted offers. • Ego or News Monitoring - this enables users to receive 'filtered' headlines or news that are based on a specific phrase or keyword. • Industry-specific feed - used by technical professionals in order to market, promote, or communicate with current (and prospective) customers and clients within their specific industries. RSS feeds enable people to track numerous blogs and news sources at the same time. To produce an RSS feed, all you need is the content or the article that you want to publicize and a validated RSS text file. Once your text file is registered at various aggregators (or 'news readers'), any external site can then capture and display your RSS feed, automatically updating them whenever you update your RSS file. RSS tools are useful for sites that add or modify their contents on a regular basis. They are especially used for 'web syndication' or activities that involve regular updates and/or publications, such as the following: • News websites - as used by major news organizations such as Reuters, CNN, and the BBC. • Marketing • Bug reports • Personal weblogs There are many benefits to using RSS feeds. Aside from being a great supplemental communication method that streamlines the communication needs of various sectors, RSS tools and feeds can also have tremendous benefits in your business, particularly in the field of internet marketing. RSS tools and feeds p updated on a daily (and even hourly) basis. Internet users will be able to experience 'real time' updates as information in your own file (such as new products and other business-related releases) is changed and modified simultaneously with that of the RSS feeds that people are subscribed to. 3. Custom-made content services. With RSS, visitors can have personalized content services, allowing them total control of the flow and type of information that they receive. Depending on their interests and needs, visitors can subscribe to only those contents that they are looking for (such as real estate or job listings). 4. Increase in (and targeted) traffic. With RSS, traffic will be directed to your site as readers of your content summary (or 1 to 2 lines of your article) who find them interesting are 'forced' to click on a link back to your site. These are just several of the many things that you can do with RSS. The possibilities are endless, and they are all aimed at providing you with an effective internet marketing strategy for your business. Talking about business a friend of mine just told me about a fantastically easy business start up @ http://urmarketer.com

drink and drive

I would like to share an experience with you, about drinking and driving. As you well know, some of us have been known to have had near brushes with the authorities on our way home from the odd social session over the years. A couple of nights ago, I was out for a few drinks with some friends at the Marriott Hotel and had a few too many beers. Knowing full well I may have been slightly over the limit, I did something I've never done before: I took a bus home. Sure enough I passed a police road block but as it was a bus, they waved it past. I arrived home safely without incident, which was a real surprise; as I have never driven a bus before and am not sure where I got it