Clotaire Rapaille talks about the hidden reasons that derive people’s decision makings unconsciously. He “un-codes” many culture codes across the world (mostly of Americans) and demonstrates the importance and procedure of appealing to them from a business point of view.

For internet entrepreneurs that conduct almost all of their business it is important to understand the various culture codes as we deal with them on almost every service we offer. It is important to know what English people think and what they want in a business deal so that we can offer our services to them. It is also just as important how English think when shopping online as that is how our clients (or ourselves) measure our success.

Clotaire Rapaille believes that people rarely (can) tell you the true reasons they make their decisions. He believes asking people directly about their reasoning behind their shopping and decisions makings is wrong. He instead asks them indirect questions and analyzes those answers. He believes the answers that people give are not important, rather the structure, the grammar, and the way they present the answer are important.

For example when asking people what they look for in a car, they might answer fuel efficiency, comfort, and reliability while the real answers are neither. For an American auto maker to be successful they would have to tap into those unconscious reasoning behind car shopping in order to be successful.

Clotaire analyzes many culture codes in his books and you would be very surprised when you see the real reasons why people (and yourself) make many decisions or think about topics unconsciously. Following are some of the codes explained in the book:

• American culture code for food.
• American culture code for president.
• American culture code for money.
• American culture code for quality.
• American culture code for work.
• French, German, and English culture code for “American”.
• and many more.

Reading the books and understanding the culture codes analyzed already gave me so much more insight into the topics and in some cases made me completely reverse some of my marketing and business decisions.

I am reading the book for a second time now to learn another skill: being able to ask the right questions (as Colataire Rapaille did) to figure out the hidden reasons that online visitors to my sites make their shopping decisions or what the real reasons are that they like or dislike certain design elements or features of the site.

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Board of advisors, board of directors, and similar concepts tend to remind us of large, sophisticated companies and not the typical internet business that we might be running out of our home. We, the small business owners of internet, should also put together a board of advisors.

Why We Do Need A Board Of Advisors

The concept of getting advice from other professionals in our field (internet business) is nothing new. We always post our new/improved websites to website hospital categories of forums for reviews and feedback. Almost all of us constantly use many other webmasters as members of our board of advisors without noticing it.

There are a lot of good outcomes from asking for advice from other people, especially webmasters. Everyone tends to look at issues (in this case websites) in their own perspective. We have different perspectives from each other so by talking to others we are exposing ourselves to many new perspectives regarding the features and services our site offers. So we should keep doing it.

The problem or shortcoming that the above strategy has is that it relies on many webmasters. Often the webmaster that gives us advice on site B is not the same webmaster that gave advice on site A. Therefore he is not familiar with our habits, standards, way of executing our ideas, and so forth. Knowing these factors about us, can help the advisor to give us better and more specific advice.

The webmasters we rely on have different skill levels and it’s hard to tell their skills simply by their short review on our “Review My Site” thread. We have been running our online business for a while and are naturally at a higher skill level than an average webmaster; however most of the people that have time to review other websites are newer webmasters. Therefore we are not always getting the most in-depth reviews when looking for one.

So put together a board of advisors from professionals in your area of work. Do keep asking for reviews on webmaster forums and from friends and family. However, if you plan to take your business to a higher level having a board of advisor consisting of professionals better than yourself can be prove very successful.

Who To Put On The Board

First let’s figure out what the function of this board is. A board of advisor takes on the responsibility to critic your past actions, key future decisions, new ideas as well as to give you different perspectives on various issues. While you could ask your advisors questions such as “how good does my site look?”, the more important questions are of the form “what and how can certain new features help improve the site?”.

It is very important to put together a diverse team of advisors that can help you in many areas including small business, marketing, entrepreneurship, financial, and more. Not everyone on the board should have internet skills; as a matter of fact it is best to have non-internet-skilled advisors on board too for different perspectives.

Example of non-skilled advisor: My mom thinks the “Work From Home” ads on TV or Internet are very attractive and she is actually interested to learn more about them. I consider almost all of them spam and useless and would have never thought people are forgiving enough to believe them.

It is also important to construct your board of advisors from local professionals around where you live so that you and them can meet together at least once every 3 months. As internet entrepreneurs, we sometimes lose touch of the real world and the importance of networking with locals.

One of the beautiful things about a board of advisors is that often you can put together a team of highly skilled professionals free. Most of the times people are happy to give advice and help their peers/students to succeed, but don’t abuse that. Put the team together truly because you want to hear their advice and improve your business/service.

The main professions that I would like to include in my board of advisors are:

• Marketing advisor
• An internet entrepreneur that has already passed my current level in the online world.
• Business advisor
• A friend that knows me at a personal level

How To Find Advisors

Once you know the skills you’d like the board of advisors to posses, you need to actually find advisors with such strengths. Following are some tips that might help you in the process:

• Look local. Find people that live close by so that getting together for meetings are practical.
• Search through people you already know. You would be surprised how many professional you come across on a daily basis without noticing.
• Go to local entrepreneurship meetings/get together and meet people that are more successful than yourself. Every town and area has such meetings in one form or another, go out and find them.
• Go to the local college/university. Professors have a passion for teaching and helping others. They would be more than happy to help if they have time.
• Don’t ask the CEO family friend that you know. CEOs and people with high responsibilities have a very busy schedule. So while they might be successful and have great advice, they won’t be able to spend time learning about your business or meet with you and the other advisors.

I have asked a number of people with the above skills to join my board of advisors. Once the team is put together I will introduce them in a sepearte post.

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Here are some statistics according to BusinessCoach and Score that should get your attention:

• The average un-happy customer will tell 8 to 16 people about it.
• 91% of unhappy customers will never purchase service from you again.
• It costs 5 times more to attract a new customer than to keep a current one.
• If you make an effort to remedy customer’s complaints, 82 to 95 percent of them will stay with you.

The value of a satisfied customer might be close to zero from business point of view as the customer has already bought the service/product. However the value of a loyal customer is priceless. Loyal customers come from satisfied customers so it is vital to keep customers happy.

Bose Example:

I was fortunate enough to have coffee with Steve, the managing director of a large charity foundation (worth over $100 million). He gave me many valuable business and life advices. One of the key topics in our conversation was marketing and customer service. He had strong belief that keeping customers happy at even seemingly high costs is very significant. He gave me an example of his experience with Bose. The story serves as perfect example for our topic here.

Steve had bought a pair of Bose headphones for $100. Couple days after the purchase (using and loving the headphones) he had gone on a business trip. On the airplane the passenger besides him trips over the headphones wire and damages it (making it useless). Steve was very upset about it and in the next airport (while waiting for a connection flight) debated with himself whether to buy another set of headphones or not - They were good headphones but rather expensive too.

He finally decides they are worth another $100 and heads to the Bose shop at the airport. He tells the Bose employee about his experience on the plane and how he wants to buy a new headphone. The employee takes the damaged headphone from him and gives him a brand new one at no charge.

The cost for Bose to give Steve a new headphone was close to nothing. They had already made so much more from him fro the sale of the first $100 headphone. The factory cost for Bose for the new one that they gave away is probably less than $15 too. However look at what Bose has gained by this strategy. Steve (as he stated himself) will be a loyal Bose customer and promoter for life. He will be willing to pay the extra cost for getting a Bose speaker or home theater system even though it might be more expensive than the equipment is worth.

When Steve sees such great customer service and the measures that Bose is willing to take to make sure he is happy, he immediately associates that with future customer service that he will get whether it is buying another Bose product or getting service on one that he owns.

Steve is willing to pay the extra cost of a Bose product because he is getting such unheard-of customer service and the fact that Bose is caring about something other than his money.

Circuit City Example:

If you remember I had huge troubles with Circuit City customer service and wrote about it many time on my blog.I will never be shopping at Circuit City in future (they are going out business anyways). Also imagine all the people that have read my blog posts about them. Do you think they will shop at Circuit City or Best Buy if given the choice?

Bottom line is you should always try to keep your customers happy. Go the extra mile to satisfy them. Reply your emails as soon as you can, be respectful of them when talking to them o the phone, truly try to undertand their position, and be willing to sacrifice.

If you can, surprise them with a service/product (t-shirt, magazine, picture, etc.) that they didn’t expect to get from you. Customers are not always looking for the absolute cheapest place to shop. In fact they are willing to pay a premium price for better service.

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Since the software seemed so easy to use, I thought I would record every transaction and at the end of the year I could press a button, print all required papers, and finish my taxes in couple days. Whoever bet against me won.

I found it rather difficult to record my transactions on Quick Books as they are mostly online and with people with no business name or address (sometimes just an email with not even a name). Of course I didn’t take any time or classes to actually learn the software either.

So now one more time I will be stuck with a lot of digging to do to be able to fill out correct tax forms.

I will try to find a good tutorial on how internet entrepreneurs can use QuickBooks effectively. If not, I will create a video myself and post it here.

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• It is created just for bloggers.
• They offer products to promote that I can actually see myself promoting.
• Bloggers are required to make in-post disclosure of all affiliate links.

Their offers include items like personalized flash drives:

Or bring new users to SocialSpark:

I am very excited about Social Spark and will definitely be working with them starting immediately. Other bloggers that have joined SocialSpark are Shoemoeny, Neil Patel, and Chris Brogan.

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The process of drawing the Root Locus with Matlab is as follow:

1. Define the numerator (num).
2. Define the denominator (den).
3. Draw the Root Locus (rlocus (num, den))

So let’s say we want to draw the root locus for the following system:

G(s) = k / ( s )*( s^2 + 4s + 8 )

The Matlab code will be:

1. num = [1];
2. den = conv ([1 0] , [1 4 8]);
3. rlocus (num, den)

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Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.
I have seen many claiming that the above poem is actually written on top of the entrance of United Nations headquarters in New York City. However I haven’t seen any pictures or evidence of it.

Either way it is a powerful poem and one more time reminds us that we are all humans. The dead everywhere in the world hurt as much as the dead here in America.? Let’s value human life the same everywhere.

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Background: Previously, I also owned a wallpapers website which was making about? $600/month from Adsense. I sold it for close to $9k as I wanted to move into affiliate marketing business and growing my other websites. Another reason was that as much as I tried to comply with Google policy, some of the wallpapers were questionable. Anyways,? I sold it. The new owner has taken a new approach with the website which I would have never done which is the reason? I won’t post a link to the website.

Back to Topic: I had hand coded my previous wallpapers website. Now I think I have found a new very easy-to-use software to do the just that: Jalbum. I’m using it to create a wallpapers website and put one or two Adsense codes on it.

I will make it mostly movie wallapers and things like Simpsons wallpapers, and Windows XP wallpapers.? However the main challenge is not to make the website but to bring 10k uniques or more visitors to the website.

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Pros of Canon SD870:

• The pictures are great. I usually set the pixels at 2mp and am very happy with them. I use this camera for shooting photos in small parties, daily photo shoots, and generally times that I can’t carry around my Canon 20D which is majority of the time.
• The view screen on the back of camera is very large. This is much more useful than you might think.
• The features are endless. I won’t bother listing them here as you can read them on any website, but I use almost all of the features, unlike other camera that have tons of features that I never use.
• It records good videos. You can actually records videos that are presentable.
• It has 3.8x optical zoom which is fairly large among the point and shoot digital cameras.
• It is fairly small and fits in side pocket easily. So you don’t have to ask your wife/girlfriend to put it in her purse.
• The image stabilizer does magic.

Cons of Canon SD870:

• It is a bit (not much) noisy when taking pictures, so it’s hard to take surprise pictures.
• I would have liked a battery that lasts longer but comparing to other cameras SD870 is not bad at all.

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